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Comment by ianlevesque | Hacker News Reader

I think it's relevant that Transmit is a local native app. There's no hosted app exposed to the internet to hack here. Google made one lengthy process that doesn't fit this use case.

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Panic runs a cloud-hosted sync service that syncs your credentials and connection info between different instances of Transmit you may have.

No idea if that's what google is targeting here, but that is a cloud service, that presumably gets a copy of people's Google Drive OAuth keys if they use Google Drive with Transmit and the sync service.

That isn't a factor in Google's decision making. An app is an app as far as they're concerned, whether it's a local client or some sort of hosted service.

If they are connecting to Google Drive, is that not connected to the internet?

There’s no way for someone on the internet to reach into your Transmit app and make it do something.

How can you be so sure? Even after reading all the source code, there still can be bugs, attacks, demanding letters from different agencies, misconfigurations, vulnerabilities in code and in libraries, etc. etc. etc.

If your threat model is the NSA leaning on a developer to ship a compromised build, KPMG is not going to catch that. If it’s that you’re going to use Transmit to connect to a server which is compromised and exploits your client to exfiltrate your Drive files, guess what else they’re not going to prevent?

It’d be one thing if Project Zero was running serious audits but this policy is designed to let them check audit checkboxes so when you lose data, it’s hard to sue Google.

All of which would also impact the Google Drive client installed on the same machine. None of Google's requirements seek to address this.

exposed to the internet and connected to the internet are different. Exposed implies that traffic originating from the internet reaches the app. You still do have to worry about things like parsing malicious files, but the class of relevant attacks is much smaller and generally easier to defend against.

Everything's connected to the internet, what the OP was talking about was attack vectors and since Transmit is a local app it really isn't one unless your whole machine is compromised, which in that case you're screwed.

There are lots of ways a local app can be compromised. It can read a local config value unsafely which can be influenced by some other app that does talk to the Internet, for example.

There's a reason why airgapping is the only way to secure important systems (and of course that can also have a number of vulnerabilities).

And besides, how do you know it's a local only app if you haven't audited it?

"Just trust me bro" -- some dev

DNS.

If it makes outbound connections and you control DNS, you own it.

I imagine you could do this sitting in a café with an open hotspot.

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