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.
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.
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.
Besides. They said "all software on your machine". That is trivially false, to a significant degree.
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 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.
- 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.
Flatpak could of course be significantly better... but it's still a massive step in a better direction.
flatpacks have access to all my files, they would be useless without. And they are the only sensitive files in my computers