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

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".

It's pretty much the opposite. A lot of modding communities' security model is literally just to "trust the community."

Example: https://skylines.paradoxwikis.com/Modding_API

> The code in Mods for Cities: Skylines is not executed in a sandbox.

> While we trust the gaming community to know how to behave and not upload malicious mods that will intentionally cause damage to users, what is uploaded on the Workshop cannot be controlled.

> Like with any files acquired from the internet, caution is recommended when something looks very suspicious.