Obsidian plugin was abused to deploy a remote access trojan

https://cyber.netsecops.io/articles/obsidian-plugin-abused-in-campaign-to-deploy-phantom-pulse-rat/

by cmbailey • 2 months ago

366 220 2 months ago

cyber.netsecops.io

slowmover• 2 months ago

The victim is prompted to enable the "Installed community plugins" synchronization feature.

Obsidian has the proper protections in place to prevent this type of attack, and the victims are being convinced to ignore them. This is just a successful social engineering event. I hate to see Obsidian dragged down by this headline, since this attack is not exploiting a vulnerability in it or its plugin system.

cmbailey• 2 months ago

Right, I'm a heavy Obsidian user myself, and love it.

I think the value of this disclosure is more in spreading awareness about plugins, and demonstrating the vector. Where less sophisticated users may think, "Oh, this is just a collection of markdown files. I don't need to be too worried about malicious code."

Groxx12• 2 months ago

Ehm. No? https://obsidian.md/help/plugin-security#Plugin+capabilities

Due to technical limitations, Obsidian cannot reliably restrict plugins to specific permissions or access levels. This means that plugins will inherit Obsidian's access levels. As a result, consider the following examples of what community plugins can do:

    Community plugins can access files on your computer.
    Community plugins can connect to internet.
    Community plugins can install additional programs.

Obsidian has no protection at all. Installing a plugin gives it full access to your computer.

This was only a matter of time, and honestly I think it's inexcusably negligent that they shipped a plugin system like this at all since about 2010 (or arguably much earlier).

pointlessone• 2 months ago

It does give full access but Obsidian does tell you that. Community plugins are not enabled by default, you have to enable them manually. Same happens with a shared vault: once you get it you still have to manually enable plugins. So far no one managed to sneak in a plugin completely unnoticed.

moron4hire• 2 months ago

A program one runs on one's computer can and should be able to do computer things. The alternative road you're advocating for ends in hardware attestation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48086190

Paul-E• 2 months ago

Obsidian seems like a perfect candidate for a WASM/WASI based plugin system that would properly sandbox plugin code.

hirvi74• 2 months ago

Seems like the same risks of downloading plugins/packages for various text editors.

e28eta• 2 months ago

I remember reading that page sometime pre-COVID, and being surprised at just how ridiculous it was. It started strong with “The Obsidian team takes security seriously”, but then almost everything else on the page led me to believe they didn’t actually take security very seriously.

I agree with the claim of negligence. I think they were more than happy to reap the benefits of a thriving community plugin ecosystem, and were hoping this page would provide enough CYA when security breaches inevitably occurred.

TIP: If you're working with sensitive data and wish to install a community plugin, we recommend that you perform an independent security audit on the plugin before using it.

I wonder just how many plugins received a security audit.

poulpy1233• 2 months ago

Community plugins can access files on your computer. Community plugins can connect to internet. Community plugins can install additional programs.

That's what make obsidian plugins useful. It it's just for having themes , there is no need for them

zhivota• 2 months ago

Even being social engineering, the design of the plugin system allowing this means the platform is completely unusable as a sharing tool. It's good to know but to me this is not "I need to remember to have these settings correct to use a shared Obsidian vault", this for is instead "never accept a shared Obsidian vault, demand a plaintext export".

ValveFan6666• 2 months ago

What is this vibe-coded site? Why does it reiterate the same point 20 time? What are the actual plugins that I need to be on alert for? Chop chop, get to it.

kid644• 2 months ago

This is just the first detected and reported instance, in all likelyhood such attacks have been happening for some time. When will the fanatic userbsse finally admit that using Obsidian in any enterprise setting is just plain malpractice?

It takes 5 minutes in their Discord channel to see the founders are D&D nerds, not competent engineers. It was never meant for serious work.

TacticalCoder• 2 months ago

It takes 5 minutes in their Discord channel to see the founders are D&D nerds, not competent engineers.

I know absolutely nothing about Obsidian but I'd expect quite a few competent engineers to also be D&D nerds no!?

Are you saying the two are mutually exclusive?

kid644• 2 months ago

No I'm not. But I'd encourage you to visit and see for yourself why these outcomes are completely predictable.

dspillett3• 2 months ago

the founders are D&D nerds, not competent engineers

The two are not mutually exclusive. What would you trust more than a nerd? A jock? A spod? An MBA?

Any evidence of other examples if bad engineering you can point to, or are your thoughts on the pluggin system and throwing shade at random groups of people all you've got?

[FYI: I know little of obsidian other than planning to look into it at some point as people I know use and like it. I stepped into this set of comments in case there was something useful I should be passing on to those people]

chillfox• 2 months ago

The attack relies on social engineering to get the victim to disable protections and could just as easily have happened with a plugin for any code editor.

Anyway, What I like about obsidian is that it can handle a truly huge amount of notes without slowing down, and the notes are just markdown files on disk, so there's no lock in. I have used evernote, ms one note and zoho notebook before, and had issues with all of them.

flashman• 2 months ago

well there was this previous issue in the crypto community where it turned out someone was not a competent engineer and should have stuck to their online exchange for magic: the gathering

amazingamazing2• 2 months ago

What software do you use that would be immune to a scenario where you disable all protections to take some action?

gilrain• 2 months ago

One whose protections can’t be disabled.

hresvelgr• 2 months ago

Am I the only one who thinks Obsidian is perfect without plugins? Half the reason I switched to it from Anytype was that it was rather spartan in its offerings. If they announced tomorrow they would ban plugins, I would not care.

CGamesPlay• 2 months ago

I'm also switching back to Obsidian after a few-year stint on Anytype, and the Notebook Navigator plugin is the only one I have installed. This is (I assume) a UI-only plugin, which shouldn't need access to external network or processes, so a quite good candidate for sandboxed plugins.

coffeefirst• 2 months ago

That’s basically how I’m using it since I got wary about how the community plugins were being vetted. Core plugins and settings cover a lot. There’s one or two things I miss, but not enough to fork and review them myself so it’s clearly not essential.

wiseowise6• 2 months ago

This. I only use official Obsidian plugins. Security + not depending on OSS maintainer are the main reasons.

wiether• 2 months ago

I wouldn't say "perfect", but to me it's clear that adding plugins could only make it worse, even without considering the security issues.

What I want from Obsidian is something that "just works". Adding third-party plugin would break this immediately since the plugins can either be straight up buggy, create conflicts with each other or simply become incompatible with new Obsidian releases.

And what I've seen from the community, with people having dozens of plugins installed, is giving me nightmares.

I can see why some would feel the appeal of plugins, and adding two or three can be fine, as long as you do your due diligence. Otherwise it's straight shooting you in the foot.

stevenkast• 2 months ago

I found plugins more useful early on in Obsidian's lifespan. Now, its current native feature list is good enough for me.

vetchzero• 2 months ago

Obsidian does not have auto update for community plugins. The steps for updating them right now is checking for updates and then updating all or individually.

A bad update to one of the popular plugins could compromise lot of systems.

jjice2• 2 months ago

I really like Obsidian. I use it every day and I don't use any community plugins because the permissions aren't up to snuff. I hope for a day where a plugin defines what it will need and that gets presented to me as a user.

I have to imagine the Obsidian team is going to respond seriously to this and I look forward to seeing what they do. They have my full confidence. I'm surprised the system was initially designed as it is without those better permissions and sandboxing, though.

BrissyCoder• 2 months ago

I started using it too when I got sick of using VS Code to look at md. Glad I never had the need to install any plug-ins! Very poor form on their part from what I can tell.

lossyalgo4• 2 months ago

Just wait until you want to create a simple table with ADD/SUM.

badcryptobitch• 2 months ago

My worse fear has materialized. This is why I've never used an external Obsidian plugin and only my own plugins. It was only a matter of time before some malicious code ended up in one.

3eb7988a1663• 2 months ago

Brother, we are vindicated! There are indeed many cool bits and blobs out there, but I am already trusting one entity to secure my private notes, no way I am taking a pinky-promise from extension XYZ to behave.

(I actually use LogSeq, but same idea applies).

kepano14• 2 months ago

Obsidian CEO here. There is a major update coming soon for plugin security. I think it will address many of the concerns people have raised in this thread. It's a hard problem but we are working on it.

That said, the headline is misleading. This article is about a social engineering attack that requires the user to actively reject multiple safety warnings in Obsidian. As far as I know this is a proof of concept, I haven't seen any reports of users being affected by this attack.

ibash• 2 months ago

lol we told you plugins were insecure years ago. I distinctly remember getting flamed in your discord because I said that they had full disk access. Too little too late.

stingraycharles2• 2 months ago

These types of problems usually only get fixed when it’s too late.

yard2010• 2 months ago

Lol it's a social engineering attack. What are you talking about. Don't run programs you don't trust, especially when being asked to do so by strangers on the line.

enoch2090• 2 months ago

You better delete all third-party applications for they are having full disk access.

PurpleRamen6• 2 months ago

The insecurity is part of the benefit. Obsidian being so open, allowing easy customizing is what makes it great. They should add some more bells, whistles and guards to prevent sneaky social attacks, but they can't close Obsidian all together, or it would kill the app.

sebastienbarre• 2 months ago

Releasing the source code to the clients would also address many of our concerns.

kepano14• 2 months ago

How would that make a difference for plugin security? Almost all plugins are already open source.

If you mean for the security of the app without plugins you can currently inspect the app's code in app.js and review third-party audits:

https://obsidian.md/security

system22• 2 months ago

LMAO. That won't happen in a million years. They are bending over backwards not to give proper file access on iOS so they can sell subscriptions. Do you think they would do such a crazy thing? I bet you my life savings it won't happen.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r• 2 months ago

you’re basically hijacking this post. this is almost entirely irrelevant. CERTAINLY highly tangential.

hackermanai• 2 months ago

actively reject multiple safety warnings

Is this like a popup? which most people actively accept without blinking

I think plugin/extensions should be a bit harder to run by default. I get the user friction from extra hurdles before using their plugins etc., but I don't think there is an actually safe way to execute arbitrary code, unaudited, without sandboxing, or other restrictions.

Daedren3• 2 months ago

The pop-ups and "social engineering" in question are things that any users in HN likely already accepted, which is to enable community plugins. These community plugins are the backbone of Obsidian and where a lot of the meat is behind its fame come from.

There's no protections beyond that, community plugins can do whatever they want. Thankfully, the vast majority of them are open-source.

wiseowise6• 2 months ago

This. Make it like a vim mode, input “I know what I’m doing” or even require some basic fizz buzz.

kepano14• 2 months ago

It's not one pop-up. To fully replicate the concept you have to agree on three separate screens (and these are not in quick succession):

1. exit restricted mode to allow third-party plugins

2. trust the author of the vault that's being shared with you

3. trust the plugins being shared with you via sync

jesse_dot_id• 2 months ago

Your product rules. Thanks.

cromka2• 2 months ago

Since we have your attention here, let me go on an unrelated note and ask whether you could look into Noteplan's workflow and see if you can add some of the required functionalities to enable replication of its workflow (https://help.noteplan.co/article/160-weekly-planning)?

Plugins like Tasks do offer a Query functionality that allows me to list e.g. weekly tasks on my daily template, replicating most of Noteplan's workflow, except Noteplan relies on being able to easily link those tasks into daily template by drag and dropping them, which internally assigns a unique but hidden by default ID in ^129abz notation (https://help.noteplan.co/article/138-synced-blocks). The latter is already supported by Obsidian, it's just not as "clean" and, AFAIK, impossible to get done when drag and dropping.

pilgrim02• 2 months ago

Get real, kepano. You’re overestimating the consciousness of most casual users. Having godmode, RCE-capable plug-ins behind few safety warnings that most people will happily ignore to get shit done is not good engineering. I understand the constraints. In your shoes I would at minimum make a different version of the app in which you could allow these plug-ins and not put them under trivial banners within the canonical version of the app. You say you have banners, but these sit in the natural flow of the user journey, the options are clearly available and these banners are merely to exempt you from any liability, not to protect the users.

fwn• 2 months ago

Chrome gutted extension capabilities for safety and now it is so useless, politically unwanted extensions have "lite" versions and every big project and their dog ship their own chromium browser.

I use Obsidian because it does not treat me like a child. They can add more nags and banners for normies, but the capabilities should remain.

lossyalgo4• 2 months ago

I don't know how hard it would be but IMHO adding some kind of permissions dialog(?) akin to Android would go a long way. 99% of Obsidian plugins don't need full disk access, or internet access for that matter.

embedding-shape3• 2 months ago

That'd require some sort of sandbox, which they already seem to not want to have, for whatever reason. If you don't want that, and you want to use JS, building any sort of permission system on top of that that you cannot easily work around, gets really tricky if not impossible.

PurpleRamen6• 2 months ago

Will there finally be an option to move the .obsidian-folder outside the vault and ignore them inside vaults by default even if plugins are activated?

troad3• 2 months ago

multiple safety warnings in Obsidian

Idk, I've always thought it was odd that the "community plugins" settings pane seemed more concerned with assuring the user that community plugins were fine than actually explaining the risk.

There is literally a single sentence about the fact that plugins "may cause data integrity and security issues", and it is hedged with the mealy-mouthed modifier "like any other software you install". The absolute majority of it - maybe 80% of the text by window height - is about the measures Obsidian does to vet and secure plugins. All of it appears to be written with the intent to placate any concerns.

Is this the safety warning? The screen that says that community plugins could cause issues "like any other software", but they're actually super safe and vetted and totally fine? Is it surprising that a person, faced with a screen like this, would be susceptible to a social engineering attack?

kepano14• 2 months ago

To replicate this attack you have to also reject two more safety warnings. The user has to accept a shared vault (you have to click "trust author of this vault"), and you have to activate syncing remote plugins.

sneilan12• 2 months ago

I've been using obsidian for years as a paying customer. Will continue to pay as price point is good and it just works. However, unless plugin security massively improves I will never install any plugins.

kepano14• 2 months ago

Obsidian is only seven people but we are working on this from all three angles:

1. Make community plugins less necessary over time as basic features become part of core

2. Improve the security of community plugins

3. Make it easy to create your own plugins that you can fully trust, e.g. with the recent release of Obsidian CLI

schaefer• 2 months ago

Obsidian stands beside the terminal and Firefox as one of the pieces of software I use the most every single day. Thank you for all you're doing.

I've read the article describing the attack, and my very first thought was utter surprise that the entire attack chain started with someone accepting a shared vault from a stranger via social media (linked in and similar). That seems really, really strange to me.

I've never shared a vault - but if I did, I'd probably do so as a git repo of markdown files.

It would be interesting to see a blog post from Obsidian about "good hygiene for sharing vaults".

sinatra• 2 months ago

Obsidian is great. And glad to see how you’re looking at plugin security. But one more thing you should consider is: How do you reduce the need for plugins for basic product behavior. E.g., I use a plugin to be able to open a file in new tab instead of replacing current tab. That should be a setting, not a plugin I’m forced to use.

kepano14• 2 months ago

I agree. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48097206

goobatrooba3• 2 months ago

I don't understand the hate here. Obsidian is a well working product that scratches many inches. Plugins allow to scratch some more itches, but are not mandatory.

I am using several plugins and would prefer not to, but they allow me to bring the (mobile) app closer to what I want (notably templater and homepage as I want to get a new daily note sorted in monthly folders, which obsidian doesn't seem to allow natively).

Maybe an alternative would also be to more explicitly allow users to create their own scripts - but maybe that's possible and I just don't know.

Overall I think the key challenge with obsidian use is that it offers too much, and there's a lot to fiddle with. While it will bother the power users probably best would be to just move on many ways to "default" behaviours and e.g. make many of the "core plugins" just settings to make the list lsss overwhelming.

wolvoleo4• 2 months ago

Will that new security interfere with plugin functionality though? I can't really do without some of them, in particular selfhosted-livesync. It's not even that I don't want to pay you for hosting my notes, it's that I don't want them on somebody else's server even end to end encrypted. If I could pay and run my own official sync server I probably would.

kepano14• 2 months ago

An update:

https://obsidian.md/blog/future-of-plugins/

dsp_person2• 2 months ago

One thing that bugged me when I made a community plugin was that you have to attach non-git-controlled files to the release (e.g. main.js).

To check if any community plugin is safe, it seems like you'd have to not only review the code on github, but also analyze the github release files to be sure nothing malicious packed in there.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something about the process, I'd appreciate if anyone could confirm or explain otherwise.

kepano14• 2 months ago

The recommended way to do this is via artifact attestation:

https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-tos/secure-your-work/...

dsp_person2• 2 months ago

Thanks that's interesting. The docs are aimed at developers, but I'm curious about the use case for the end user.

So would a user have to do some kind of `gh attestation verify PATH/TO/YOUR/BUILD/ARTIFACT-BINARY ...`? (assuming the plugin dev provides an sbom?)

eviks6• 2 months ago

What are the reasons behind the fact that almost all of these plugin systems are so poorly engineered? Is it too much work (ie, there are no good plugin development frameworks that already enable proper isolation/permission capabilities) or "simply" a widespread lack of knowledge of what is needed, so devs learn only after their own system has been abused? Both? Something else?

stingraycharles2• 2 months ago

You’ll need to define the security framework and building blocks that all plugins may need, which takes time to design, implement, verify and maintain.

Much easier to just skip that part.

So yes, it’s too much work (in the sense that you need to have a security-focused leadership that understands that this is a lot of work but the right thing to do).

pilgrim02• 2 months ago

Web stack plus lack of resources to architect the proper interfaces is my guess. These are software written in high level js frameworks, thus using poor dataflow patterns by default, mostly just following what is actually possible instead of employing intentional design, which would require going down some levels of abstraction and maintaining a custom fork of said frameworks. So they probably just architect plug-ins like you would instantiate a library passing a subset of the context the app uses. Basically the simplest workable thing possible. Although the disclosed hack does not mention any particular “vulnerability”. Plug-ins in obsidian are always in god mode, and the alleged hackers just tricked people in using them. Funny how an RCE waiting to happen behind a few popups is ultimately blamed on users. Shame on the developers.

movpasd• 2 months ago

"Worse is better" remains relevant as ever.

https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

cechmaster2• 2 months ago

even chrome browser plugins have security issues similar to this case. there are billions of dollars and many smart developers working on it. It's similar to building an app store inside your app. For the Apple app store, they reduce malicious apps by being very strict who/what people can publish and it's behind a paywall.

pdntspa2• 2 months ago

Why does a plugin system immediately imply sandboxing?

eviks6• 2 months ago

Because a box is an intuitive way to limit the blast radius of arbitrary code? But the wasn't a requirement, I'd be fine with sandbox-free secure plugin systems

PurpleRamen6• 2 months ago

At the core, there is the tradeoff between ability and security. You can give the users power and enable them doing fancy shit, or you can make it secure, stripping any meaningful ability. Usually, people prefer ability over security.

The other problem is that security is hard, and just giving generic access and adding some basic guards is simple.

eviks6• 2 months ago

The first trade-off is not precisely stated, you can do "both" with user choice. In this case it would be: no plugin has "all filesystem access" unless user explicitly approves it, and that approval steers the user to a very narrow "plugin folder only" path by the way UI is done. Think this is "secure by default"? You don't undermine any ability here because most plugins don't need any filesystem access, so you get extra security "for free" for most of the users and with only some friction (but still not removing the ability altogether) for the rest.

dbacar• 2 months ago

Reading the content the problem does not start with a plugin in Obisidian store but rather with a malicious vault they lure you to open.

brusselsprout• 2 months ago

I hope I'm speaking as a minority but when I first started using Obsidian the Youtube videos I watched encourage the usage of community plugins, even with these warnings I would enable the community plugins. You may very well have good actors that eventually turn bad for these plugins and users won't know.

Maybe I just also have a higher personal risk appetite, but even as a dev and knowing these risks I would have enabled the community plugin option. Again, hope I'm just the minority here and not most user behaviour.

goobatrooba3• 2 months ago

One issue seems to be also that there are means dead plugins, not updated for years but still available. Does that mean they are especially stable or just no longer maintained? I don't know but ili applied the same rule I would for FDroid or the play store - not to install anything that isn't actively maintained.

Also I can't tell how to prevent plugin updates. As long as you rely on a known safe version I guess there is never any real risk.

nothinkjustai• 2 months ago

I think it’s fundamentally wrong to base your plugin architecture on running user code in the same space as the application. The proper way is to evaluate plugin scripts in an interpreter running in the application, where you expose functionality through functions and state exposed to the script runtime. This means you can A) sandbox everything and B) check for things like permissions or even request permissions at runtime. It’s harder if you use a language like JavaScript for the application since you essentially have a runtime inside a runtime, but it’s possible to run something like Lua inside JS. Since I use an actually good language like Rust I have many good options for scripting, like Rhai. Lua is also a good option. Go also has multiple options including a couple good Lua libraries. These libraries tend to have performance comparable to Python which is more than enough for most plugins in most apps.

geoffbp• 2 months ago

I use the plugin for Git, and the one for tasks. Hope those are safe!

cechmaster2• 2 months ago

You are safe. The way this hack works is that someone online would contact you, share a obsidian valut with you, you open the vault, you download & install a plugin the hacker tells you to install to open the vault. It's all described in the article if you would like to read it.

Daedren3• 2 months ago

The obsidian vault is to already have the chosen plugin pre-selected and is part of the social engineering effort, that's not the main problem.

The issue is that this could happen to anyone who just searches the malicious plugin's name and installs it. Worse if it's a popular one that gets compromised.

elric• 2 months ago

I run Obsidian with restricted capabilities: no network access, and no filesystem access outside its own directory. I only enable network access when updating plugins/themes.

Same way I run any other application that could potentially execute untrusted code.

yjftsjthsd-h• 2 months ago

Could you share how you're sandboxing it?

coldtea2• 2 months ago

Obsidian sounds like a nightmare security wise in general.

cybrox• 2 months ago

How is it any worse than say, VSCode in this regard?

wiseowise6• 2 months ago

Yet another reason to not install anything third-party made. Favor batteries, built-in functionality and reject “Unix philosophy” or whatever bullshit people use to ship incomplete software under guise of.

silon422• 2 months ago

I'd ideally want Obsidian to be a distro package, including any good plugins. No plugins from the "store".

poemxo• 2 months ago

Hopefully this improves workflow for installing plugins offline. It's not bad already but it's not as good as the connected experience.

sshine• 2 months ago

You say Trojan.

I say shiny horse statue.

amipwndidunno• 2 months ago

Why the hell doesn't the article say WHICH plugins were affected so users can know if they were likely affected?

deafpolygon3• 2 months ago

It does.

It enables malicious versions of legitimate Obsidian plugins ('Shell Commands' and 'Hider') that are present in the shared vault.

lossyalgo4• 2 months ago

Thanks! I also scanned the detailed article looking for which plugins were affected and wasn't able to find it. Came to the comments looking for a quicker answer.

kepano14• 2 months ago

The specific plugins don't matter for this attack. The attack relies on the user accepting a shared vault and trusting the shared plugins. A shared vault can contain plugins that don't come from the official directory.

tredre32• 2 months ago

Because no plugin is affected. This isn't a supply chain attack. The headline is deliberately obtuse. Here's the breakdown:

1. Plugins are stored inside your vault.

2. If you open a vault from an untrusted source, it could contain custom/malicious plugins that will run things on your computer.

3. Then end.

exceptione2• 2 months ago

A long time ago I figured that "nasty Obsidian plugins" were not a matter of if, but when.

So I did the (imho) only sensible thing, and run Obsidian in a sandbox (bwrap). By doing so, I also made sure it runs in a separate networking namespace. For now, I disallow any internet access.

The amount of rage I see here is a bit strange, the whole attraction of Obsidian is that you can turn it into a Swiss army knife (that can hurt you too ofc).

@kepano: you would greatly help me if you could force plugin authors to list the urls they want to access inside the manifest, then let the user per url decide if they want to enable it. I still see some stupid plugin authors download their assets from a CDN or a vague website, from deeply buried in their code. Making url depencies explicit helps firewall automation at a first step. Maybe you could revoke direct network access from plugins, but i am not too knowledgeable about Electron.

jedimastert• 2 months ago

So I did the (imho) only sensible thing, and run Obsidian in a sandbox (bwrap). By doing so, I also made sure it runs in a separate networking namespace. For now, I disallow any internet access.
The amount of rage I see here is a bit strange

Serious question: do you think it is actually obvious and technically accessable to everyday people to have the thought "I should run this in a sandbox" and do it?

Like no this is not some super elite haxxr tool, it's a text editor pretty explicitly advertised as being non-technical-person-friendly.

soco• 2 months ago

I haven't seen the term haxx0r since... ages! How are they called nowadays?

exceptione2• 2 months ago

  > Serious question: do you think it is actually obvious and technically accessable to everyday people to have the thought "I should run this in a sandbox" and do it?

I meant the HN crowd ofc. I assume the non-technical obsidian user would not be present here.

You have a point though that non-technical people are screwed, but they have always been. Their whole lives and biometrics rest on Google and Apple servers anayways, while a good part of their identity is being traded by non-scrupulous commercial predators under the veil of advertising purposes. They are so beyond f*cked that I did not include their concerns wrt Obsidian plugins.

gejose3• 2 months ago

Love Obsidian but I've previously commented about the security model for plugins here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45308131. TLDR: your entire vault (and possibly filesystem) is exposed to every single plugin you install.

I really do think Obsidian needs 2 things to have any reasonable security:

1. It needs to be a lot more batteries-included. A user shouldn't need a plugin for basic functionality.

2. It needs a granular permission system, where each plugin should have to declare and prompt you to allow or reject specific permissions, just like on iOS and Android. The system should enforce that a plugin cannot bypass this.

criddell• 2 months ago

A user shouldn't need a plugin for basic functionality.

What functionality are you thinking of? I just looked and I've never enabled community plugins.

My Obsidian complaint is the opposite. I think its bloated well beyond the initial premise of a markdown editor over a directory of files. I think it was just about perfect right before the introduction of the Canvas feature.

kepano14• 2 months ago

More batteries-included

Can I ask, what basic functionality is Obsidian missing in 2026? (I work on the app)

gejose3• 2 months ago

Hey kepano, really love the work you're doing!

Here are some feature I wish existed in Obsidian without any plugins:

* Dataview [1] (this is now solved with Bases, so I really appreciate that)

* Folder Note [2] (I, and I assume many others come from Notion, and I wish this were a thing)

* Recent files [3]

* A built in calendar [4]

* Link embeds [5] (or something to store previews for pasted links)

* Waypoint [6], or something to create a table of contents

These are just things I wish existed, but whether or not these are 'basic' can be debated. Ultimately I do wish there were a robust permission system for plugins so that personal functionality gaps can be plugged, but without compromising safety.

References: [1] https://blacksmithgu.github.io/obsidian-dataview/ [2] https://github.com/xpgo/obsidian-folder-note-plugin [3] https://github.com/tgrosinger/recent-files-obsidian [4] https://github.com/liamcain/obsidian-calendar-plugin [5] https://github.com/Seraphli/obsidian-link-embed [6] https://github.com/IdreesInc/Waypoint

anmr• 2 months ago

There are many essential features missing that should be included in the core app for security, compatibility, longevity and for the benefit of new users who prefer to stay clear of plugins.

1) Basic functional search

Search should handle different order of words, misspellings (fuzziness), offer indexing and searching in a larger scope than just titles and aliases (e.g. headers or content), as well as allowing users to customize search priorities. Basically - just include Omnisearch as a core plugin.

2) Basic image preview

Displaying an image on full screen, with panning and zoom, when clicked upon.

3) Full "folder notes" support

Out-of-the-box support for a vault structure where each note has its own dedicated folder where all its attachments are placed. While the basic functionality is present, an external plugin is required to declutter the vault file hierarchy and actually make this approach feasible. Folder notes approach is in my opinion the only way to keep a large vault organized.

4) Basic formatting.

Text coloring. Text alignment and justification. Basic image positioning. Proper text flow wrapping around images. Table formatting (at least a setting minimum column width).

5) Markdown parsing within HTML tags

Basics Markdown features like [[linking]] don't work within a section of text enclosed by HTML tags. And using HTML/CSS is currently required to achieve basic formatting like centered or colored text.

6) Option to use the first h1 tag as the note title

I'm talking about actual support for this and integration with core functionality like search and linking. Useful (sometimes long) titles are an essential part of note-taking and knowledge databases. Meanwhile, filenames are simply semi-unique file system identifiers. Forcing users to use filenames as titles compromises the usefulness of titles and leads to issues with filename / filepath length. In HTML and Markdown, the h1 tag was always intended for the title.

7) Consistent formatting between reading view and editing view

Rendering of content, especially vertical spacing between elements differs between those views for no credible reason. The code syntax highlighter is also deficient in editing mode, despite it being the mode in which Obsidian users spend 99% of their time while writing, editing and reviewing notes.

It's not an exhaustive list, but these are the biggest pain points right now. And let me repeat - you shouldn't continue to rely on community plugins for these features. Even though community plugins are great, they are a security concern, their development could cease at any point, and new users don't know about them.

wiseowise6• 2 months ago

Better task management, todo lists, reminders, powerful macros/templates.

_qib3• 2 months ago

This is becoming a bit of an epidemic. Not every attack or exploit (and especially not a social engineering one) needs a name out of Metal Gear or a website.

Analemma_• 2 months ago

When Heartbleed happened and they gave it a cool name and a fancy dedicated website, it was neat and probably necessary for that bug but I immediately had a sinking feeling that from then on every 2-bit security consultant trying to get free publicity would follow that playbook for nothingburger vulnerabilities, which is exactly what happened.

nstart• 2 months ago

This is a misleading headline. It makes it seem like another supply chain attack where some good plug-in was taken over and used to deliver malware. Thats not the case here. Victims are invited to collaborate on a synced vault which comes preloaded with a non official plug-in that delivers the rat. Very very different story

deafpolygon3• 2 months ago

What’s misleading?

"Novel Campaign Abuses Obsidian Note-Taking App to Target Finance and Crypto Professionals with PHANTOMPULSE RAT”

It’s novel (new), an abuse of Obsidian, specifically targeting a group of people.. and the RAT is embedded in the vault.

kepano14• 2 months ago

The headline on HN is different: "Obsidian plugin was abused to deploy a remote access trojan". It's not a plugin that was abused, but the ability for shared vaults to contain plugins.

rahilb• 2 months ago

Seems like a nice place to plug my Mac app that syncs your obsidian tasks to Reminders.app: https://turquoisehexagon.co.uk/remindersync (for me the only thing obsidian is missing on a fresh install).

It’s sandboxed; can’t make network connections and can only read the directory you select. I’m surprised Apple haven’t added OS level functionality to block network connections / folder access for non sandboxed apps, similar to running an un-notarised binary.

sneilan12• 2 months ago

This is why I NEVER install any obsidian plugins - EVER. Obsidian itself is good. Obsidian plugins = security nightmare.

HackerThemAll• 2 months ago

How to say you haven't read the article without saying you haven't read the article...

hereme888• 2 months ago

Whoever taught LLMs to design webpages to look like that? I find myself telling agents to specifically not design like that.

It's so a distracting and unfocused

ApolloFortyNine• 2 months ago

I don't know when Obsidian gathered the hate I'm seeing here, but 'bad plugins' is a failure mode of most everything that has plugins.

Personally it feels similar to being mad at Windows if you were to install an exe someone emailed you and it turned out to be a virus.

You can install bad chrome plugins, bad wow addons, basically anything that's purpose is to run user code can be used to run bad code.

Personally I'm glad the _note taking app_ prioritized allowing for custom plugins over pushing back features so they could spend an extra year locking down user plugins. They can put some additional effort in but running unknown code will always be a risk.

brazukadev• 2 months ago

There is no architectural limitation that makes it impossible for a plugin to not have full filesystem access.

The fact that creating a good plugin system is difficult does not give them a free pass to not implement a good one, it is a for profit company that has a considerable revenue.

marknutter• 2 months ago

https://plugin.observer would come in handy for this.

Itoldmyselfso• 2 months ago

A very relevant article: "On the security of plugins" (in notes app)

https://standardnotes.com/blog/on-the-security-of-plugins

goobatrooba3• 2 months ago

While not wrong I'm not sure the publisher is uninterested as they are a competitor.

E.g. this is how they criticise obsidian - suggesting that a default location backup is somehow worse than default cloud sync is just very strange to me.

Obsidian stores your data as a folder of plaintext files on your local computer. You are thus responsible for securing this folder and making it available on your other devices. This is particularly difficult on mobile platforms that lack access to a robust file system.

philipdavis• 2 months ago

i tried very hard to find a plugin that was deploying a Trojan but couldn’t find any. It looks to be a POC report. The title is so misleading and terrifying

Obsidian plugin was abused to deploy a remote access trojan

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