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  • node815@lemmy.worldEnglish
    381·
    2 years ago

    For those that don’t want to go back to the Dark side (Reddit), the post referenced a theme (Grey Layout global theme) which got KDE Dev’s involved who in reaction removed the listing from the store.

    In short - the theme ran code to run a rm -rf on the user’s drive which wiped everything during install. Aside from backing up your data religiously, be sure to inspect the code instead of blindly installing for now. KDE Dev’s said they will need to do better so I expect some changes are afoot to provide better security.

  • mvirts@lemmy.world
    31·
    2 years ago

    Great time to mention tools like testdisk that can easily recover data that has been recently deleted on common filesystems.

    • AMDIsOurLord@lemmy.ml
      11·
      2 years ago

      Themes are very powerful beings in KDE. they can install SDDM themes and scripts, they can set Kvantum themes, custom parameters for other parts of the system etc.

      You can’t really do that shit without scripting

    • dinckel@lemmy.world
      11·
      2 years ago

      It’s really not uncommon for a lot of themes to package an installer script, in case they have multiple versions, or multiple colors bundled. Realistically, they should just each have their own store page, but it’s a colossal pain in the ass. The Catppuccin global theme, for example, has 16 color variants, 2 decoration variants each, and then also a version with no splash. The whitesur theme is similar.

      I do agree though that if this is going to continue to exist, it should not have permissions it has today

    • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Because themes are not just skins, as I understand. Themes are a collection of a lot of different kinds of components, from color schemes and fonts to window decorations and to a custom interactive SDDM menu as the other commenter said.

  • fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works
    10·
    2 years ago

    We really need better sandboxing for the desktop. I see why scripting can useful for themes, but why the heck would they have so much fs access?

  • Samueru@lemmy.world
    91·
    2 years ago

    It is a bug, and not only that, it is KDE6 related lmao. It’s the steam bug again!

  • jherazob@beehaw.orgEnglish
    91·
    2 years ago

    On the Reddit thread people, at least one of them tagged as a KDE dev, mentions that widgets NEED to be able to run arbitrary code. I am absolutely baffled by this.

    • Michal@programming.dev
      12·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • baseless_discourse@mander.xyz
        1·
        2 years ago

        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.orgEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          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·
            2 years 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.

  • Dr Jekell@lemmy.worldEnglish
    102·
    2 years ago

    This is why you back up your data!

    I use both Timeshift and Lucky Backup.

    Timeshift is setup to back up the entire OS and user data and fire off a backup when updating (onto an internal drive).

    Lucky Backup has been setup to do a one way sync of my user folders (doc’s, download, pictures, videos etc) onto an external drive.