> The victim is prompted to enable the "Installed community plugins" synchronization feature.
Obsidian has the proper protections in place to prevent this type of attack, and the victims are being convinced to ignore them. This is just a successful social engineering event. I hate to see Obsidian dragged down by this headline, since this attack is not exploiting a vulnerability in it or its plugin system.
>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).
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.
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. Any compromised plugin could take over your machine. There's no protection or sandboxing whatsoever. It's even more insecure than browser extensions (that could steal your browser cookies and information, but at least don't take over your machine).
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.
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
Right, I'm a heavy Obsidian user myself, and love it.
I think the value of this disclosure is more in spreading awareness about plugins, and demonstrating the vector. Where less sophisticated users may think, "Oh, this is just a collection of markdown files. I don't need to be too worried about malicious code."
Am I the only one who thinks Obsidian is perfect without plugins? Half the reason I switched to it from Anytype was that it was rather spartan in its offerings. If they announced tomorrow they would ban plugins, I would not care.
Even being social engineering, the design of the plugin system allowing this means the platform is completely unusable as a sharing tool. It's good to know but to me this is not "I need to remember to have these settings correct to use a shared Obsidian vault", this for is instead "never accept a shared Obsidian vault, demand a plaintext export".
This is just the first detected and reported instance, in all likelyhood such attacks have been happening for some time. When will the fanatic userbsse finally admit that using Obsidian in any enterprise setting is just plain malpractice?
It takes 5 minutes in their Discord channel to see the founders are D&D nerds, not competent engineers. It was never meant for serious work.
> the founders are D&D nerds, not competent engineers
The two are not mutually exclusive. What would you trust more than a nerd? A jock? A spod? An MBA?
Any evidence of other examples if bad engineering you can point to, or are your thoughts on the pluggin system and throwing shade at random groups of people all you've got?
[FYI: I know little of obsidian other than planning to look into it at some point as people I know use and like it. I stepped into this set of comments in case there was something useful I should be passing on to those people]
The attack relies on social engineering to get the victim to disable protections and could just as easily have happened with a plugin for any code editor.
Anyway,
What I like about obsidian is that it can handle a truly huge amount of notes without slowing down, and the notes are just markdown files on disk, so there's no lock in.
I have used evernote, ms one note and zoho notebook before, and had issues with all of them.
> The victim is prompted to enable the "Installed community plugins" synchronization feature.
Obsidian has the proper protections in place to prevent this type of attack, and the victims are being convinced to ignore them. This is just a successful social engineering event. I hate to see Obsidian dragged down by this headline, since this attack is not exploiting a vulnerability in it or its plugin system.
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:
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).
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.
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.
As one of those people that uses Obsidian without plugins, what plugins do you consider essential?
Yeah, but these attacks are possible without any of that complexity.
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. Any compromised plugin could take over your machine. There's no protection or sandboxing whatsoever. It's even more insecure than browser extensions (that could steal your browser cookies and information, but at least don't take over your machine).
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
"Hey users: don't do insecure things. Here's a button to do cool insecure things!" is not a plugin security model.
Obsidian seems like a perfect candidate for a WASM/WASI based plugin system that would properly sandbox plugin code.
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
Right, I'm a heavy Obsidian user myself, and love it.
I think the value of this disclosure is more in spreading awareness about plugins, and demonstrating the vector. Where less sophisticated users may think, "Oh, this is just a collection of markdown files. I don't need to be too worried about malicious code."
Am I the only one who thinks Obsidian is perfect without plugins? Half the reason I switched to it from Anytype was that it was rather spartan in its offerings. If they announced tomorrow they would ban plugins, I would not care.
Even being social engineering, the design of the plugin system allowing this means the platform is completely unusable as a sharing tool. It's good to know but to me this is not "I need to remember to have these settings correct to use a shared Obsidian vault", this for is instead "never accept a shared Obsidian vault, demand a plaintext export".
This is just the first detected and reported instance, in all likelyhood such attacks have been happening for some time. When will the fanatic userbsse finally admit that using Obsidian in any enterprise setting is just plain malpractice?
It takes 5 minutes in their Discord channel to see the founders are D&D nerds, not competent engineers. It was never meant for serious work.
> the founders are D&D nerds, not competent engineers
The two are not mutually exclusive. What would you trust more than a nerd? A jock? A spod? An MBA?
Any evidence of other examples if bad engineering you can point to, or are your thoughts on the pluggin system and throwing shade at random groups of people all you've got?
[FYI: I know little of obsidian other than planning to look into it at some point as people I know use and like it. I stepped into this set of comments in case there was something useful I should be passing on to those people]
The attack relies on social engineering to get the victim to disable protections and could just as easily have happened with a plugin for any code editor.
Anyway, What I like about obsidian is that it can handle a truly huge amount of notes without slowing down, and the notes are just markdown files on disk, so there's no lock in. I have used evernote, ms one note and zoho notebook before, and had issues with all of them.
What software do you use that would be immune to a scenario where you disable all protections to take some action?
> It takes 5 minutes in their Discord channel to see the founders are D&D nerds, not competent engineers.
I know absolutely nothing about Obsidian but I'd expect quite a few competent engineers to also be D&D nerds no!?
Are you saying the two are mutually exclusive?
No I'm not. But I'd encourage you to visit and see for yourself why these outcomes are completely predictable.