Don’t most plugin models work this way? Does VSCode, Vim, Emacs, and friends do anything to segregate content? Gaming is the only area where I expect plugins have limited permissions.

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raincole 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Gaming is the only area where I expect plugins have limited permissions.

It's pretty much the opposite. A lot of modding communities' security model is literally just to "trust the community."

Example: https://skylines.paradoxwikis.com/Modding_API

> The code in Mods for Cities: Skylines is not executed in a sandbox.

> While we trust the gaming community to know how to behave and not upload malicious mods that will intentionally cause damage to users, what is uploaded on the Workshop cannot be controlled.

> Like with any files acquired from the internet, caution is recommended when something looks very suspicious.

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jabbany 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Browser extensions also have a relatively robust permissions-based system.

If they wanted to, one would guess that browser-ish local apps based on stuff like Electron/node-webkit could probably figure out some way to limit extension permissions more granularly.

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0cf8612b2e1e 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I would have thought, but it has been how many years, and as far as I know, there is still no segregation for VSCode extensions. Microsoft has all the money and if they cannot be bothered, not encouraged that smaller applications will be able to iron out the details.

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jabbany 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I think it's just because supply-chain attacks are not common enough / their attack surfaces not large enough to be worth the dev time... yet...

Sneak in a malicious browser extension that breaks the permissions sandbox, and you have hundreds of thousands to millions of users as an attack surface.

Make a malicious VSCode/IDE extension and maybe you hit some hundreds or thousands of devs, a couple of smaller companies, and probably can get on some infosec blogs...

	▲	connicpu 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The solution at my job is you can only install extensions vetted by IT and updates are significantly delayed. Works well enough but sucks if you want one that isn't available inside the firewall.

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schmichael 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

vim and emacs are over 30 years old and therefore living with an architecture created when most code was trusted. Encrypting network protocols was extremely rare, much less disks or secrets. I don't think anything about the security posture of vim and emacs should be emulated by modern software.

I would say VSCode has no excuse. It's based on a browser which does have capabilities to limit extensions. Huge miss on their part, and one that I wish drew more ire.

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erik 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Gaming is the only area where I expect plugins have limited permissions.

Do you mean mods on Steam? If you do, then that's down to the individual game. Sandboxing mods isn't universal.

	▲	0cf8612b2e1e 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I was thinking more Lua/Luaua which make it trivial to restrict permissions. In general, the gaming client has access to a lot more information than it shares, so to prevent cheats from plugins, the developers have to be explicit about security boundaries.

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gejose 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Perhaps, but I think what you might put onto Obsidian (personal thoughts, journal entries etc) can be more sensitive than code.

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4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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