Yes. I'm constantly annoyed by the dark patterns Zoom and Slack use to trick you into downloading their desktop apps. The web experience is practically indistinguishable and much more secure.

When I really need to run an app on my Linux laptop, it always gets its own bubblewrap container.

Don't let yourself be fooled into thinking this is enough. Plenty of examples of, especially through wasm, being able to reach far beyond what they're supposed to.

It gets buttoned up fast and is always getting better, but its absolutely not a silver bullet.

Even on Mac, where apps like Dropbox showed you a FAKE DIALOG to STEAL YOUR ADMIN PASSWORD:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463338

They are restructuring their companies regularly and keep the core company small.

Or the reason to run Firefox in a FreeBSD jail to get server-grade security. But the question is can an attacker get access to the Firefox profile data? Because you cannot block that from Firefox, obviously.

I guess it also has access to the cookies for all your logins.

interesting you mention. because Firefox doesn't have a way to disable the single instance functionality which was used on this telegram vulnerability.

one long time Firefox contributor have been for a couple years now removing every part of the --noremote option. even botching (Ooops!) the console notice that the flag was no-op some time ago.

The little I have to run Telegram Desktop for, I run in a VM. I'd never let the little oligarch's code touch my desktop OS.

> It's not strictly-speaking a Telegram-specific vulnerability. It's a vulnerability of all modern desktop operating systems allowing any user process to read/write any user file.

No, it's definitely a Telegram specific vulnerability. It might be worse because of poor defense in depth, but without Telegram itself being vulnerable it wouldn't matter.

At the same time the mobile operating systems are vulnerable to vendor lock-in due to the absence of this functionality. It is clearly a worse problem that a user can't give their backup system access to the photos stored by other applications (often social media), or for instance reliably capture media streams to use in for instance a remixing application. Bringing custom clients when the software originally used to create the interesting files starts acting against the users by introducing subscriptions or being abandoned is another example of the user dictating what software accesses what files is critical to secure the users operations. Consumers need security against commercial interests infinitely much more than commercial interests need protections against consumers, and it would be unethical to enable commerce at the expense of individuals like the mobile operating systems do.

> vulnerability of all modern desktop operating systems allowing any user process to read/write any user file

not true on macos.

If you don't believe it's a vulnerability, then you must believe that tricking Telegram into uploading your messages database to the attacker, leaking all your private conversations, is A-OK? Telegram owns that file, after all.

Yes, and there are many ways for apps to opt into this, to limit their own blast radius in a case like this.

Does Telegram do that, or do they consider themselves beyond bugs, just like they consider themselves too clever and untouchable by anyone to need end-to-end encryption?

That's broadly-speaking a vulnerable design of all OSes, but strictly speaking it is a bug in Telegram that is now fixed at the app level. Though sandboxes / app isolation solutions exist even in the broadly vulnerable OSes, so apps could use them already today to avoid such issues in the future?

> Ideally all programs should be isolated from the underlying filesystem and be able to read only their own files and files from per-program data directory

So how will you spam all the group chats you're on with meme gifs downloaded from facebook then? :)

Telegram is available sandboxed from the Mac App Store on macOS.

It is.

Not all user processes upload those files somewhere surreptitiously.

Of course operating systems should support that isolation (hopefully in some better way than the hell that smartphones are), but it's not like Telegram can blame the OS for this vulnerability.

> It's a vulnerability of all modern desktop operating systems

Uhm, OpenBSD would like a word, buddy.

https://man.openbsd.org/unveil

It was, but most people will believe what their peers (real or parasocial) say over the collective screams of every security researcher on the planet, so here we are.

Still we are using it, because UX kills any other app and people that are (probably) behind it will cause almost no harm to casual, not-interesting people :)

And yes, I know that by default chats are not E2E, that phone number has way too many effects on accounts etc. Still, UX and agencies interested in important people are more welcome than data selling, ad-based companies.

Absolutely, but mostly for their protocols, statements, people and infrastructure.

A file exfiltration vulnerability is still noteworthy.

Here's one from Filippo

The Most Backdoor-Looking Bug I’ve Ever Seen - https://words.filippo.io/telegram-ecdh/

It has this feature where it tells you about other users that are on the platform. I mean it's not a huge leak, but right off the bat it's pretty poor security posture. For an app that competes with other chat apps on supposedly being more secure and privacy aware, it does worse than whatsapp on that end.

That is such a JiaTan grade feature because it’s an insane way to implement it but also plausibly deniable.

Yeah, something like that would not have prevented the account takeover part, though, which relies on Telegram's own files; or the access to cached files.

was a feature.

technically, this is one agency burning the feature of another agency.

You would still get a notification inside Telegram that someone else logged in (plus it sends the login code to your session first before you can fallback to SMS) and you can log them out. The "attacker" can't delete your account or log out your sessions because he can't use certain features on a fresh login, there is a downtime. But yeah, he can read all your chats. Same should be true for any app that uses phone number login. That's why there is a password feature.

I guess that’s the idea with phone number based services. Imagine if you could not sign up for telegram/ WhatsApp/ whatever because someone used your number before you.

Yet the oligarch who supposedly lives in exile has visited Russia over 60 times since https://kyivindependent.com/kremlingram-investigation-durov/

is that a threat or an ai doomsday whataboutism