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

(obsidian.md)
469 points saeedesmaili | 2 comments | 19 Sep 25 22:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.446s | source
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gejose ◴[19 Sep 25 23:42 UTC] No.45308131[source]▶
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".

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0cf8612b2e1e ◴[19 Sep 25 23:45 UTC] No.45308149[source]▶
Don’t most plugin models work this way? Does VSCode, Vim, Emacs, and friends do anything to segregate content? Gaming is the only area where I expect plugins have limited permissions.
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jabbany ◴[19 Sep 25 23:55 UTC] No.45308244[source]▶
Browser extensions also have a relatively robust permissions-based system.

If they wanted to, one would guess that browser-ish local apps based on stuff like Electron/node-webkit could probably figure out some way to limit extension permissions more granularly.

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1. sunaookami ◴[20 Sep 25 11:05 UTC] No.45312257[source]▶
>Browser extensions also have a relatively robust permissions-based system.

Yeah and they suck now. We need a better security model where it's still possible to do powerful stuff on the whole machine (it's MY computer after all) without compromises.

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2. Barrin92 ◴[20 Sep 25 16:01 UTC] No.45314470[source]▶
>We need a better security model where it's still possible to do powerful stuff on the whole machine

That's not possible. If you can do powerful stuff on the whole machine by definition you have no security. Security is always a question of where you create a perimeter. You can hand someone a well defined box in which they can do what they want, you can give someone broader access with fewer permissions, but whether vertically or horizontally to have security is to exercise control and limit an attack surface.

That's even implicit in the statement that it's YOUR computer. The justification being that there's a dividing line between your computer and other computers. If you'd be part of of a network, that logic ceases to hold. Same when it comes to components on your machine.