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Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2023 17:31:07 -0500
From: Grant Taylor <gtaylor@...tconsulting.net>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: with firefox on X11, any page can pastejack you
anytime
On 10/18/23 2:30 PM, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> That's the crux of it but I don't think it frees Firefox from
> responsibility.
Please elaborate on what Firefox's responsibility is here?
> Despite the premise being contrary to common sense and fifty years
> of evidence, Firefox promises to sandbox all of the bad things that
> untrusted third-party code might do to you.
So perhaps Firefox needs to change their statement / stance. Much like
Google Chrome got sued over private browsing mode not preventing web
servers of pages your visiting retaining logs.
> Are there any other programs that run third-party code by default
> and are not considered vulnerabilities?
I'm sure there are many things that run third-party code that people are
not aware are vulnerable. Email clients like Evolution come to mind. I
would be shocked if OpenOffice / LibreOffice probably also qualify as
programs on *nix systems that have the possibility of unexpectedly
modifying the clipboard / selection buffers*.
I saw an interesting thread -- I think on the Zsh mailing list --
talking about protecting end users from unexpected things that make
sense in hindsight. E.g. shell globing expanding `*` into all files in
the directory, including files with `-` at the start of their name and
potentially if not likely altering the behavior of the command, probably
in an undesirable way.
I have to wonder how far programs / their programmers must go to protect
users from themself.
Where does the program's / programmer's responsibility stop and the
users responsibility start?
Aside: The thread in question brought up some interesting idea,
including altering how things that start with unsafe characters --
though I wonder why not all files -- with `./` so the `-bob` file
becomes `./-bob` when expanded. -- I wondered about prefixing globing
with `--` which is the de-facto don't process anything after this as a
command line flag.
*To those who would complain about my use of the term "buffer" ... I
agree that the primary and secondary selection $TERM doesn't contain the
selected data, rather pointer to the program containing the data. But
there is $SOMETHING that holds that information about where the
selection is, a pointer of sorts. I'm taking the liberty of using the
term "buffer" to refer to this location holding the pointer to the
information. -- The clipboard is different and will retain data after
the program that is the source of the data terminates, unlike the
primary / secondary selection.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
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