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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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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 itThis 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-trashto 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
rmis probably sandboxing.