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Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

Ehm. No? https://obsidian.md/help/plugin-security#Plugin+capabilities

>Due to technical limitations, Obsidian cannot reliably restrict plugins to specific permissions or access levels. This means that plugins will inherit Obsidian's access levels. As a result, consider the following examples of what community plugins can do:

    Community plugins can access files on your computer.
    Community plugins can connect to internet.
    Community plugins can install additional programs.

Obsidian has no protection at all. Installing a plugin gives it full access to your computer.

This was only a matter of time, and honestly I think it's inexcusably negligent that they shipped a plugin system like this at all since about 2010 (or arguably much earlier).

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It does give full access but Obsidian does tell you that. Community plugins are not enabled by default, you have to enable them manually. Same happens with a shared vault: once you get it you still have to manually enable plugins. So far no one managed to sneak in a plugin completely unnoticed.

"Hey users: don't do insecure things. Here's a button to do cool insecure things!" is not a plugin security model.

Meanwhile that is exactly what a lot of people here want for Android with side loaded apps

I'm not sure I agree or understand where you're coming from. Side-loaded Android apps are still bound by all the same permission restrictions as any app installed by the Play Store. The only difference is Google didn't review it (for what little good that does) and that I didn't get the app from Google.

If I side-load a camera app, it still has to ask for camera privileges the same way any Play store app does.

Is there something in your message I missed about how it relates to this article or is this just being uninformed about side-loading?

Sideloading bypasses nothing at all except Google's thumbs-up, Android's permission system doesn't work that way.

That's horse hockey. Obsidian is not a usable system without community plugins.

Folks will reply "but I use it every day without plugins".

That position disregards software usability as a formal discipline, along with decades of UX research and standards.

The attack here requires not just enabling community plugins, but also syncing the attacker's vault to your computer, and also separately enabling the synchronization of the attacker's plugins with yours.

Yes, in this specific case.

Obsidian Plugins are still incredibly vulnerable. A compromised plugin will essentially take over your machine. There's no sandboxing of any kind. It's even more insecure than browser extensions (that could steal your auth tokens, but at least don't have unfettered access to your filesystem).

This is really unfortunate. I love Obsidian and am a paid subscriber for many years, but the community plugins needs a security overhaul asap, before someone gets hurt.

The same is true for all software on your machine.

Not even slightly. Browser extensions are a trivial counter-example, as are all flatpacks, and anything restricted by user/group. That covers probably literally a majority of all software on your computer, because people have been voluntarily restricting their software to protect you from their potential accidents for decades.

> That covers probably literally a majority of all software on your computer

If you're running GNU/Linux, chances are you'll have hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of software that run totally unsandboxed.

Yes, a very small minority of applications are unfortunately primarily distributed via flatpak or snap, and the distributors don't care about the user experience, so it's error-ridden and problem-ridden, but chances are you can get a "normal computer program" version of it unencumbered by such grossness.

And tons won't be part of e.g. root, or dialout (to pick one I've had to deal with a lot lately), or many other more-privileged-than-default groups, yes. That's a permissions system working as intended.

Besides. They said "all software on your machine". That is trivially false, to a significant degree.

I was pointing out that the claim that "literally a majority of all software on your computer" runs sandboxed is also trivially false, to a significant degree

A majority have more access controls than obsidian plugins, yes. I think that's fairly safe to say, given that new system installs often have hundreds of processes already running.

Sandboxing, at least in the sense of easily configurable access with default deny on most even somewhat sensitive things: agreed, sandboxing is fairly uncommon in general, definitely not a majority on most systems. When ignoring the elephant in the room: mobile OSes.

> A majority have more access controls than obsidian plugins, yes

A majority run as me, a minority run with root privileges.

> I think that's fairly safe to say, given that new system installs often have hundreds of processes already running.

Precisely! Those hundreds of pre installed processes are running without sandboxing, or any access control beyond what Obsidian has.

For example, did you know you can just `ls` a directory, or `cat` a file, and both of those applications will run with full, unsandboxed, unrestricted access as you? And there are countless preinstalled applications just like those.

In practise, Flatpak packages have many more permissions than you might expect, and the sandbox feature gives a false sense of security. For example, the Obsidian Flatpak package [0] is given all of the following abilities without explicit permission from the user (the user has to know where to look to find out about them):

- Home folder read/write access

- System folder media

- System folder mnt

- Microphone access and audio playback

- And more...

The Obsidian snap [1] is installed with the --classic flag, which also grants access to the whole home directory, but at least you have to consciously specify the --classic flag to grant this permission.

[0] - https://flathub.org/en/apps/md.obsidian.Obsidian

[1] - https://snapcraft.io/obsidian

fwiw blocking access to anything except my notes folder (and denying internet, among other things) is my very first step when installing Obsidian. Flatseal makes that quite simple.

Flatpak could of course be significantly better... but it's still a massive step in a better direction.

> flatpacks

flatpacks have access to all my files, they would be useless without. And they are the only sensitive files in my computers

So in other words, yes the apps have full filesystem access unless you specifically sandbox them with the OS.

Yeah, but these attacks are possible without any of that complexity.

As one of those people that uses Obsidian without plugins, what plugins do you consider essential?

Same here, zero plugins for me.

I rely on Advanced URI, which opens certain functionality up to external apps. I use Raycast and with Cmd+Space, it lets me open vaults or daily notes. And Obsidian_to_Anki, but that's probably just me because I have no clue how to use Anki otherwise.

Me too.

All I want is a top-notch Markdown editor with a mobile app and trustworthy sync, and that's what Obsidian gives me. And if ever Obsidian goes away or is enshittified, I'll still have a perfectly good folder of Markdown documents that I can take elsewhere.

An ADD/SUM feature on tables was the first plugin I installed. It could be argued this should be part of the TABLE but I guess the dev team has a lot on their plate not to mention I'm not even sure if there's a feature request for this ability.

Yeah, I don't use any community plugins. I take notes in obsidian. And it turns out, having multiple years worth of notes and todos in a tree of crosslinked markdown files is pretty handy in this AI era. I take notes in obsidian and run the Gemini cli from my vault. Works a treat.

For me these are the self hosted livesync, copilot and readitlater for better web clippings.

I really don't want my notes on other people's servers so the official sync will never be an option unless they enable that to be self hosted as an option.

I think that's especially important to point out because it reminded me of a blog post by Obsidian that also was discussed here[1], where they talked about reducing supply chain risk by not relying on dependencies, but people quickly pointed out that this is only possible because users depend so heavily on extensions. Just look at that top comment and here we are now.

This combination of software relying on third parties without security seems to be untenable. Personally I've gotten rid of just about as many extensions as I can anywhere and switched to batteries included software.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45307242

The real problem is people believing "plugins" are not full software.

If you install a dozen mini-apps from random developers you never heard about, you can't complain if one is malware.

Krita also has a plugin system based on Python. Any "plugin" has the same level of access as running a python script.

Personally I blame operating systems for not providing a way to isolate how programs interact with user files.

Software engineers at large would benefit from playing World of Warcraft, and seeing the ongoing fight between Blizzard and add-on authors.

WoW's whole UI is built in the same Lua environment as add-ons, and Blizzard has implemented some interesting restrictions (like the taint system[0]) to prevent add-ons from completely automating gameplay.

0. https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Secure_Execution_and_Tainti...

World of Warcraft is one of the most popular MMO's ever made.

You simply can't expect every software that wants a plugin system to have the same security practices as the most used software in the world.

In fact, there are many reasons why you might want a plugin to have full filesystem and internet access, such as batch processing or simply adding things directly from webpages. Sandboxing this will just make plugins less useful.

In the end it's a problem of trust. You're installing software from untrustworthy developers because you trust the name of the application those plugins are associated with.

You could fix the problem in Obsidian, but the same problem will happen in other software. Some of which simply can't justify bothering with sandboxing plugins. This is just the way plugins are.

> You simply can't expect every software that wants a plugin system to have the same security practices as the most used software in the world.

I'm not saying that I think they should, or that I expect them to. I'm saying that it's one particular implementation of sandboxing that has a bunch of interesting properties, and that makes it worth studying.

Thanks! I've been meaning to read up on taint systems, looks interesting :)

I'm somewhat convinced that taint-influenced capabilities is a good future model to pursue. Computers are fast, I'm fairly confident that it chould be done at whole-computer scale and still be reasonable... though probably not with a million electron apps. Which is likely a good thing in aggregate (I say as a fan of web tech and the very compelling features such things offer. Great for minor or PoC, not for major pieces of software).

If you happen to use the WoW example in the future, the wiki efforts moved from the fandom one to wiki.gg[0], as voted by maintainers and contributors in late 2023[1].

0. https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Secure_Execution_and_Tainting

1. https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Wowpedia:About_the_wiki#Bac...

Krita: that is a decision by Krita(/GIMP) and not anything inherent in "plugins" or "python" - it could be a bubblewrap/firejail contained process, for example (other OSes have similar-ish options but there's always something, e.g. don't use cpython). They have chosen to continue to put their users at risk by not doing anything at all like that.

There are of course complications, costs, and downsides associated with doing that. It might not be worth it currently, or performance costs might be too high, or the community might be overwhelmingly using abandoned plugins that won't be updated, etc. It's still a decision to remain complacent until forced by attacks though, it's well beyond common knowledge that these things happen so you can't really call it ignorance.

But I use it every day without plugins.

Seriously though, I agree with your sentiment that community plugin security can and needs to be improved, but how does someone saying they use it every day "disregard software usability as a formal discipline, along with decades of UX research and standards"

If you want to use a niche, academic definition of "usable", that's fine but you better be ready to explain yourself.

Because in general, "usable" means "people use it". Which they do for Obsidian without community plugins without issues.

To make an actual counter, you need numbers. If only a tiny niche of users use it without community plugins, then yes, it's unusable (in a practical definition of the term)

If that's so, then without numbers, it's neither usable nor unusable.

Indeed, if you don't know anything about use, you can't say much about usability.

> Obsidian is not a usable system without community plugins.

It's horse hockey. Plenty users use the vanilla Obsidian.

> Folks will reply "but I use it every day without plugins".

Because they do. You're saying that they should lie about their usage to fit your narrative?

> Plenty users use the vanilla Obsidian.

They are irrelevant for this dispute, because these problems do not concern them. And the amount of people using plugins because of some real demand is not low.

What dispute?

The parent comment says that Obsidian is not usable without plugins and it's simply nonsense. It would be very charitable to call this a "dispute."

Could Obsidian handle plugin permission better? I guess so. But that doesn't mean the users have to use plugins. It's ultimately the user's choice. Blender has zero security guards over the addons besides the OS's and the ecosystem thrives. So does Minecraft. These communities are essentially "arbitrary Python/Java code goes brrrr."

> What dispute?

The discussion about the plugin-system, and the people who need it to which degree.

> The parent comment says that Obsidian is not usable without plugins and it's simply nonsense.

Sure, fair. But the comment happened in the context of talking about the plugin-system, and parent comment seems on the side that for them obsidian is worthless without plugins. Saying that other people have no need for them is pointless, because they are not in the picture. Phrasing could indeed be better, but talking about people who are not concerned by the problem is not really adding anything to the discussion.

I think if the wording had been something like "I, one person out of billions, personally find Obsidian to be unusable without plugins", there probably would have been no disagreement and this discussion would be moot.

The disagreement was because the actual claim made was far broader, and in that far broader context, opposite to reality. We can assume good faith and an honest mistake in wording, but we can also forgive respondents for reasonably taking the words at face value.

Using it daily without plugins is, by definition, a "usable system".

A program one runs on one's computer can and should be able to do computer things. The alternative road you're advocating for ends in hardware attestation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48086190

There are in-between models, such as:

* Android's permissions model where the user must approve specific potentially undesirable classes of actions (separate from the 24H delay, etc controversy)

* Optional sandboxing

I remember reading that page sometime pre-COVID, and being surprised at just how ridiculous it was. It started strong with “The Obsidian team takes security seriously”, but then almost everything else on the page led me to believe they didn’t actually take security very seriously.

I agree with the claim of negligence. I think they were more than happy to reap the benefits of a thriving community plugin ecosystem, and were hoping this page would provide enough CYA when security breaches inevitably occurred.

> TIP: If you're working with sensitive data and wish to install a community plugin, we recommend that you perform an independent security audit on the plugin before using it.

I wonder just how many plugins received a security audit.

I use only one plugin because I am aware of the security model (or lack thereof). I only use one because I read the source and am convinced it’s safe. It would be foolish to blindly install many plugins.

Agreed, but also they prominently feature that they support plugins. Currently it's the second paragraph on the home page: https://obsidian.md/

They're trying to get all the benefits while pushing the extremely-obvious-to-them downsides into subpages. Not hidden, but not shown along-side the feature. It's intentionally misleading for non-technical users.

Obsidian seems like a perfect candidate for a WASM/WASI based plugin system that would properly sandbox plugin code.

For at least the vast majority, yes definitely. I'm fine with full bypasses existing (say a webgl thing, or web previews, custom VCS integration, there are tons of legitimate reasons to escape a sandbox), but they should be an abnormality with heavy warnings and proportionate community attention to watch for issues, not the only option.

I don't think they meant it this way, but I honestly consider unsafe official plugin systems to be negligent to the point of being actively malicious. By releasing one, if you ever become successful you have explicitly chosen to screw over an unknown number of your users to save yourself a relatively small amount of work in the short term. It might be single digit users, or it might be septuple digit users - is it really worth it?

(Unsafe unofficial plugins, like most games? Mildly unfortunate but I think that's fine. Though a healthy modding community around your stuff should be a VERY STRONG sign that you should introduce a safe version to protect your users, if it won't cause you to implode (it definitely can)).

Has WASM/WASI DOM-access? When I last read about the architecture, there was a strict separation between WASM, Javascript and the app, but also a movement to allow UI-customization from WASM-space. Many Obsidian-plugins are adding heavy UI-changes, so without that, it would be kinda pointless.

Not generally / as many would hope, but that's partly because both WASM and WASI are not targeting being a full javascript-in-browser replacement - they're lower level, larger APIs are built on top, not defined by them. It's fairly easy to build an unsafe and unstable DOM access layer (a little bit of eval or string key accessers), but the web changes rapidly and isn't a stable target - exposing that in a stricter environment is tricky, and no one approach is likely to solve all needs.

Seems like the same risks of downloading plugins/packages for various text editors.

> Community plugins can access files on your computer. Community plugins can connect to internet. Community plugins can install additional programs.

That's what make obsidian plugins useful. It it's just for having themes , there is no need for them

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