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Malicious KDE theme can wipe out all your data
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this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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That is not possible. widgets and Global themes have to be able to execute code to work.
By the way: the code was not malicious, just badly written.
Why do global themes need to do that? Arent they just color and image files, maybe audio?
It doesnt really matter if the code was malicious or not, this should not be possible.
Another example of how damn insecure linux is. Just because its not the snap store, we dont have tons of malicious addons on pling.
@Pantherina
Yeah, by the same logic lets also call hotdogs dangerous because people have also choked on them!
https://nypost.com/2023/07/11/4-year-old-girl-dies-after-choking-on-costco-hot-dog-report/
At some point we should understand and agree that PEBKAC is a real thing. Logic dictates not to blame Linux and hotdog, and instead understand the consequence of using unverified/unvetted software.
@Bro666
Well, yes: the store does advise caution, as we have little control over themes and widgets uploaded by their parties. The same way we would advise caution about running random software downloaded from the internet. That said, it does say KDE Store, so we should have some degree of control over it for our users' sake. That is what we are working on.
That said part II, we can't do with it the wider communities support. There simply isn't the human resources necessary. The 2 options we have are to close down the store completely (but then people will just go to random GitHub repos and download stuff from there), or try to leverage the community to help us locate and remove (or at least quarantine) dodgy products.
@Bro666
One obvious fact that I though would never need to be reiterated (but here we are):
Almost all OpenSource licenses approved by OSI and/or FSF have "Disclaimer of Warranty" clause in one way or another. This is from MIT:
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
https://opensource.org/license/mit
More examples:
https://opensource.org/license/gpl-3-0#section15
And this too. I mean, it is not like it is the fine print either. They capitalise the whole paragraph.
Absolutely, and I would like to help with that.
But I think there are multiple parts to this:
Of course a dolphin extension always executes code. I think hiring a bunch of KDE users as pretesters could work, to enforce that every extension needs to be tested by the 2 community members to end up in the store. There could also always be a way to unhide untested addons etc.
And enforcing stricter guidelines for the extensions is also important of course