Malicious KDE theme can wipe out all your data

wisha@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 185 points –
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/13397700

Malicious KDE theme can wipe out all your data

Or is it just buggy?

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Aren't widgets pieces of software? Of course they have to run code. But they need to be isolated, or at the very least not have sudo access.

Think of html+css, themes are supposed to be that kind of code who does nothing by itself.

Widgets aren't themes. They're things on your desktop that people are using for example for showing a folder - and if that can't interact with the system, that widget's functionality is broken.

Of course, that should not apply to install scripts or the like, which shouldn't be a thing at all really. And it should be made a lot more obvious which downloadable things can execute code / which ones are "guaranteed" safe and which ones may not be.

I think the theme mentioned probably don't have sudo access, just user access can do enough harm already.

I think rm command should refuse to remove overly-broad target (home, xdg dirs, media drives) without confirmation in the command line.

Ok, then a bad actor could enumerate all the subdirs and delete them one by one.

Even if going down this path would be a good solution, I don't think this is rm's job to do. This should be done by an antivirus a security suite. I think I have read that for the past few years the kernel now has a better API than inotify to get notified by file operations. I don't remember it's name, but I think it was even mentioned in the docs that security software is a use case of it

This is not a defense against bad actor, but defense against bugs in bash script, which is quite common. Another idea is to introduce a new trash command xdg-trash to replacerm. But both of these cannot stop malicious actors removing your file.

I think even if we have a security suite, it is unlikely to detect bad actor recursively enumerating the file and delete them one by one, until many files were irrversably lost.

Antivirus has never been a proper way to achieve security, I think the proper way to defend against offensive rm is probably sandboxing.