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

The Future of Obsidian Plugins

obsidian.md

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 186 posts

Re: The Future of Obsidian Plugins

#111

Post by kepano »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #109

I think that plugins are an inherent risk, there is a pop up in obsidian warning the user before enabling them, and it's up to the user to agree or not. In my opinion, what could have been done is kind of like what mozilla does where it will vet some of the most popular extensions, so that you know there is at least some kind of verification on these extension, and let everything else be wild. I'm not sure that you c…

The blog post describes this but there are still manual reviews, similar to what you are asking for. We just need to expose that in the UI.

AI is not used in the review process. The system is primarily based on our open source eslint plugin, with additional dependency and malware scanning

https://github.com/obsidianmd/eslint-plugin

Re: The Future of Obsidian Plugins

#112

Post by andai »

nickjj wrote: post #101
andai wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think the best (only?) way to solve the plugin security problem would be to properly sandbox them with an explicit API and permission system. I want to say "and especially prevent them from touching my private data (i.e. the whole point of Obsidian plugins being to read/write the documents)". But if it can't talk to the internet, I kind of don't see the issue. EDIT: Apparently due to how JS and Electron works, Obs…

> But if it can't talk to the internet, I kind of don't see the issue. No internet access doesn't save you. With file system access it can delete a file. Without sudo access it can silently add something to your user's crontab so a few days from now it runs a custom shell script that does anything with internet access. If you're not checking into this sort of thing regularly, you wouldn't know. It can add something t…

Oh right. I keep forgetting second order effects are a thing.

Re: The Future of Obsidian Plugins

#114

Post by dostick »

Why the iOS app so terrible? Is it a web app? I have couple plugins on desktop and it makes iOS app load something then I must press reload and again. It’s a terrible experience, how could this been released like that?

Re: The Future of Obsidian Plugins

#115

Post by amarant »

kepano wrote: post #30

Obsidian CEO here. We've been working for nearly a year to launch this new Community site and review system. I'm very excited about this first version but there are many more improvements to come. I've tried to be exhaustive with the blog post, FAQs, and next steps on our roadmap, but I am sure I forgot some things, so feel free to ask! This has been an incredibly challenging project for a number of reasons. We're on…

One thing that I think would be a huge boon that I didn't see mentioned in the article is permissions.

Basically a plugin would need to request and receive permission to use APIs from the user. Wanna write to disk? Ask the user for disk permissions(preferably limited to certain paths). Wanna phone home? User has to approve that permission upon install(or first usage or whatever)

Kinda like how Android manages permissions (maybe iOS too?I dunno I don't use it)

That's probably a bit of work, but it would make me feel a lot safer about plugins if you could make it happen!

Edit: wait I just realised that the "disclosure" part might actually be this, and I just got confused by the terminology used? I don't think it's entirely clear from the text if a plugin could technically use capabilities without disclosing them? Hopefully they can't, and then that's good enough, I think.

Re: The Future of Obsidian Plugins

#116

Post by btown »

kepano wrote: post #74
btown wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrats on the launch! Curious about whether the automated scanning system flags expansions of scope and network domain access for internal/human review. For instance, an AI summarization plugin that starts by saying it accesses url="api.openai.com"+path with a user-supplied OpenAI key is going to be incredibly common - and I'm really excited for what the community builds here! But what if that plugin has an update…

Every update is scanned, and we will be regularly re-scanning all the latest versions of every plugin as we improve the system. The review system is based on our eslint plugin which itself open source and reproducible, so anyone can contribute to improving it: https://github.com/obsidianmd/eslint-plugin And since plugins are open source, users can also audit the code and flag issues via the Community site.

That's very cool - using a linter as a standardization system removes a lot of the guesswork out of submitting! But it's an unenviable challenge to guard against bad actors here - there's now an open-source oracle that an attacker could use to see if their technique would sneak by the review process, and they can have a coding agent iterate until successful.

I might encourage adding things like https://ofriperetz.dev/articles/eslint-plugin-security-is-un... or https://github.com/mozilla/eslint-plugin-no-unsanitized as things that flag for further review - and likely adding even more that you might not publicize as part of the eslint-plugin repository, so there's a more obscure level of protection that might catch a would-be attacker!

Re: The Future of Obsidian Plugins

#117

Post by wolvoleo »

rpastuszak wrote: post #68
wolvoleo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ink" for drawing (big miss in the standard feature set IMO, the only one thing I missed coming from OneNote which is horrible in every other way compared to Obsidian). "Self-Hosted Livesync" for syncing on your own server (I don't want my stuff on other people's computers even when encrypted) "Copilot" for AI integration (I use two local ollama servers as you might have guessed from the above :) ) "Whisper" for text…

My version of your list: Excalidraw, Git, Ollama/rarely Claude Code, Handy.computer, Obsidian Clipper

Thanks I'll check those out too. I don't like git for syncing though otherwise I'd have used that already.

I'm also still looking for a good search because the built in one doesn't really work well for me.

I tried the ollama one but I found the copilot plugin more full featured. However one thing I do have an issue with is that the author is trying to sell their own service. For now it still works ok with self hosted LLM though.

And Excalidraw I didn't see, I'll check that out too.

Re: The Future of Obsidian Plugins

#118

Post by kid64 »

kepano wrote: post #108
kid64 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realize you're just doing your job as CEO to shape perceptions here, but this is your best effort? The docs should have correctly stated "we don't review ANY new community plugin release". Hint: This is where you would admit the review process itself was meaningless theater intended to provide a false sense of security to users that trusted you.

That would not have been accurate though.

For those that aren't aware, this is all meant to distract/confuse you in light of this story: https://cyber.netsecops.io/articles/obsidian-plugin-abused-i...

Re: The Future of Obsidian Plugins

#120

Post by kepano »

amarant wrote: post #115
kepano wrote: post #30

Obsidian CEO here. We've been working for nearly a year to launch this new Community site and review system. I'm very excited about this first version but there are many more improvements to come. I've tried to be exhaustive with the blog post, FAQs, and next steps on our roadmap, but I am sure I forgot some things, so feel free to ask! This has been an incredibly challenging project for a number of reasons. We're on…

One thing that I think would be a huge boon that I didn't see mentioned in the article is permissions. Basically a plugin would need to request and receive permission to use APIs from the user. Wanna write to disk? Ask the user for disk permissions(preferably limited to certain paths). Wanna phone home? User has to approve that permission upon install(or first usage or whatever) Kinda like how Android manages permiss…

Yes they are mentioned in the blog post in the bullet point about disclosures. You can think of disclosures as the first step towards permissions. See my previous answer here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48110592

Post reply on HN