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

(obsidian.md)
469 points saeedesmaili | 1 comments | 19 Sep 25 22:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.255s | 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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ibash ◴[20 Sep 25 03:58 UTC] No.45310219[source]▶
> 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.

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HSO ◴[20 Sep 25 05:48 UTC] No.45310762[source]▶
What if you run little snitch and block any communications from obsidian to anything?
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formerly_proven ◴[20 Sep 25 07:08 UTC] No.45311159[source]▶
Little snitch can block open(2)?
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1. TomaszZielinski ◴[20 Sep 25 12:35 UTC] No.45312838[source]▶
I treat LS as a privacy/anti-telemetry/anti-accident tool, not as anti malware.

Obviously it can detect malware if there’s a connection to some weird site, but it’s more like a bonus than a reliable test.

If you need to block FS access, then per app containers or VMs are the way to go. The container/VM sandboxes your files, and Little Snitch can then manage externa connectivity (you might still want to allow connection to some legit domains—-but maybe not github.com as that can be use to upload your data. I meant something like updates.someapp.com)