Less is safer: How Obsidian reduces the risk of supply chain attacks

This is one way to look at it, but ignores the fact that most users use third party community plugins.

Obsidian has a truly terrible security model for plugins. As I realized while building my own, Obsidian plugins have full, unrestricted access to all files in the vault.

Obsidian could've instead opted to be more 'batteries-included', at the cost of more development effort, but instead leaves this to the community, which in turn increases the attack surface significantly.

Or it could have a browser extension like manifest that declares all permissions used by the plugin, where attempting to access a permission that's not granted gets blocked.

Both of these approaches would've led to more real security to end users than "we have few third party dependencies".

> Obsidian plugins have full, unrestricted access to all files in the vault.

Unless something has changed, it's worse than that. Plugins have unrestricted access to any file on your machine.

When I brought this up in discord a while back they brushed it aside.

What if you run little snitch and block any communications from obsidian to anything?

Or firejail. Or QubesOS using a dedicated VM. There are options, but it would still be nice if Obsidian had a more robust security model.

I have been using firejail for most of these kind of applications, be it Obsidian, Discord, or the browser I am using. I definitely recommend people start using it.

Sell it to us! Why do you use specifically firejail?

There are so many options, from so many different security perspectives, that analysis paralysis is a real issue.

I feel like I should keep track of all my comments on HN because I remember writing a lengthy comment on firejail more than once. I cannot keep doing this. :D

For user-space, there is usually bubblewrap vs. firejail. I have not personally used bubblewrap, so I cannot comment on that, but firejail is great at what it does.

The last comment was about restricting clipboard access to either X11 or Wayland which is possible with firejail quite easily, so if you want that, you can have that.

You can do a LOT more with firejail though.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firejail

https://man.archlinux.org/man/firejail.1