Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Notepad++ supply chain attack breakdown

securelist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 205 posts

Re: Notepad++ supply chain attack breakdown

#31

Post by nextos »

symaxian wrote: post #21
troad wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MacOS has been getting a lot of flak recently for (correct) UI reasons, but I honestly feel like they're the closest to the money with granular app permissions. Linux people are very resistant to this, but the future is going to be sandboxed iOS style apps. Not because OS vendors want to control what apps do, but because users do. If the FOSS community continues to ignore proper security sandboxing and distribution o…

Sand-boxing such as in Snap and Flatpak?

Snap and Flatpak do both sandboxing and package management.

You can use the underlying sandboxing with bwrap. A good alternative is firejail. They are quite easy to use.

I prefer to centralize package management to my distro, but I value their sandboxing efforts.

Personally, I think it's time to take sandboxing seriously. Supply chain attacks keep happening. Defense is depth is the way.

Re: Notepad++ supply chain attack breakdown

#32

Post by rectang »

its_magic wrote: post #19
troad wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MacOS has been getting a lot of flak recently for (correct) UI reasons, but I honestly feel like they're the closest to the money with granular app permissions. Linux people are very resistant to this, but the future is going to be sandboxed iOS style apps. Not because OS vendors want to control what apps do, but because users do. If the FOSS community continues to ignore proper security sandboxing and distribution o…

I'm sure that will contribute to the illusion of security, but in reality the system is thoroughly backdoored on every level from the CPU on up, and everyone knows it. There is no such thing as computer security, in general, at this point in history.

There's a subtlety that's missing here: if your threat model doesn't include the actors who can access those backdoors, then computer security isn't so bad these days.

That subtlety is important because it explains how the backdoors have snuck in — most people feel safe because they are not targeted, so there's no hue and cry.

Re: Notepad++ supply chain attack breakdown

#33

Post by troad »

jacobgkau wrote: post #28
troad wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MacOS has been getting a lot of flak recently for (correct) UI reasons, but I honestly feel like they're the closest to the money with granular app permissions. Linux people are very resistant to this, but the future is going to be sandboxed iOS style apps. Not because OS vendors want to control what apps do, but because users do. If the FOSS community continues to ignore proper security sandboxing and distribution o…

> getting a lot of slack recently I think you mean a lot of flak? Slack would kind of be the opposite.

Haha, yes, corrected. Thank you. I have a habit of fusing unrelated expressions.

Re: Notepad++ supply chain attack breakdown

#34

Post by Soerensen »

The WinGUp updater compromise is a textbook example of why update mechanisms are such high-value targets. Attackers get code execution on machines that specifically trust the update channel.

What's concerning is the 6-month window. Supply chain attacks are difficult to detect because the malicious code runs with full user permissions from a "trusted" source. Most endpoint protection isn't designed to flag software from a legitimate publisher's update infrastructure.

For organizations, this argues for staged rollouts and network monitoring for unexpected outbound connections from common applications. For individuals, package managers with cryptographic verification at least add another barrier - though obviously not bulletproof either.

Re: Notepad++ supply chain attack breakdown

#35

Post by ashishb »

troad wrote: post #14
ashishb wrote: post #3

I am running a lot of tools inside sandbox now for exactly this reason. The damage is confined to the directory I'm running that tool in. There is no reason for a tool to implicitly access my mounted cloud drive directory and browser cookies data.

MacOS has been getting a lot of flak recently for (correct) UI reasons, but I honestly feel like they're the closest to the money with granular app permissions. Linux people are very resistant to this, but the future is going to be sandboxed iOS style apps. Not because OS vendors want to control what apps do, but because users do. If the FOSS community continues to ignore proper security sandboxing and distribution o…

It also has persistent permissions.

Think about it from a real world perspective.

I knock on your door. You invite me to sit with you in your living room. I can't easily sneak into your bed room. Further, your temporary access ends as soon as you exit my house.

The same should happen with apps.

When I run 'notepad dir1/file1.txt', the package should not sneakily be able to access dir2. Further, as soon as I exit the process, the permission to access dir1 should end as well.

Re: Notepad++ supply chain attack breakdown

#36

Post by giobox »

josephg wrote: post #17
taftster wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I almost feel like this should just be the default action for all applications. I don't need them to escape out of a defined root. It's almost like your documents and application are effectively locked together. You have to give permissions for an app to extra data from outside of the sandbox. Linux has this capability, of course. And it seems like MacOS prompts me a lot for "such and such application wants to access…

I've been arguing for this for years. There's no reason every random binary should have unfettered, invisible access to everything on my computer as if it were me . iOS and Android both implement these security policies correctly. Why can't desktop operating systems?

The short answer is tech debt. The major mobile OSes got to build a new third party software platform from day 0 in the late 2000s, one which focused on and enforced priorities around power consumption and application sandboxing from the getgo etc.

The most popular desktop OSes have decades of pre-existing software and APIs to support and, like a lot of old software, the debt of choices made a long time ago that are now hard/expensive to put right.

The major desktop OSes are to some degree moving in this direction now (note the ever increasing presence of security prompts when opening "things" on macOS etc etc), but absent a clean sheet approach abandoning all previous third party software like the mobile OSes got, this arguably can't happen easily over night.

Re: Notepad++ supply chain attack breakdown

#37

Post by [deleted] »

ashishb wrote: post #35
troad wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MacOS has been getting a lot of flak recently for (correct) UI reasons, but I honestly feel like they're the closest to the money with granular app permissions. Linux people are very resistant to this, but the future is going to be sandboxed iOS style apps. Not because OS vendors want to control what apps do, but because users do. If the FOSS community continues to ignore proper security sandboxing and distribution o…

It also has persistent permissions. Think about it from a real world perspective. I knock on your door. You invite me to sit with you in your living room. I can't easily sneak into your bed room. Further, your temporary access ends as soon as you exit my house. The same should happen with apps. When I run 'notepad dir1/file1.txt', the package should not sneakily be able to access dir2. Further, as soon as I exit the…

[deleted]

Re: Notepad++ supply chain attack breakdown

#38

Post by worksonmine »

krater23 wrote: post #20
worksonmine wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian stable. If you need something to be on the bleeding edge install it from backports or build from source. But keep most of your system boring and stable. It has worked fine for me for years.

As long as you do regulary updates of your debian stable, you are not secured against supply chain attacks.

I don't think you understand Debian. There's a new release every 2 years. A few months before every release there's the so called package freeze on the testing branch. The version the packages are on at that point that's the version they will have for the next stable release. Between releases the only updates are security updates.

Do you mean I should worry about the fixed CVEs that are announced and fixed for every other distribution at the same time? Is that the supply-chain attack you're referring to?

Re: Notepad++ supply chain attack breakdown

#39

Post by gruez »

Someone1234 wrote: post #22

I'm out of the loop: How did they bypass Notepad++'s digital signatures? I just downloaded it to double-check, and the installer is signed with a valid code-signing certificate.

The updater doesn't check the certificate of the updated installer, it just executes whatever.

Re: Notepad++ supply chain attack breakdown

#40

Post by its_magic »

ashishb wrote: post #26
its_magic wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure that will contribute to the illusion of security, but in reality the system is thoroughly backdoored on every level from the CPU on up, and everyone knows it. There is no such thing as computer security, in general, at this point in history.

> but in reality the system is thoroughly backdoored on every level from the CPU on up, and everyone knows it. Indeed. Why lock your car door as anyone can unlock and steal it by learning lock-picking?

Residents of San Francisco ask themselves that question all the time.
Post reply on HN