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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Malicious KDE theme can wipe out all your data (www.reddit.com)

submitted 8 months ago by wisha@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

53 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/13397700

Malicious KDE theme can wipe out all your data

Or is it just buggy?

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[–] Michal@programming.dev 22 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Think of html+css, themes are supposed to be that kind of code who does nothing by itself.

[–] Zamundaaa@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] baseless_discourse@mander.xyz 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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 it

[–] baseless_discourse@mander.xyz 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

This 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-trash to 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 rm is probably sandboxing.