Drawing attention on this instance so Admins are aware and can address the propagating exploit.
EDIT: Found more info about the patch.
A more thorough recap of the issue.
GitHub PR fixing the bug: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/1897/files
If your instance has custom emojis defined, this is exploitable everywhere Markdown is available. It is NOT restricted to admins, but can be used to steal an admin’s JWT, which then lets the attacker get into that admin’s account which can then spread the exploit further by putting it somewhere where it’s rendered on every single page and then deface the site.
If your instance doesn’t have any custom emojis, you are safe, the exploit requires custom emojis to trigger the bad code branch.
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This is the dumbest possible take about the situation, my lord.
I realize that you’re using ‘my lord’ as a bit of an exclamation here, but I initially read it as you addressing the commenter as your lord. it just made me imagine you with a heavily British accent, going full medieval peasant style to mock the guy. I found that quite humorous.
Something something landed gentry
This comment is so idiotic that its least stupid explanation is that it’s a false flag by a tankie to make their critics look like idiots.
Jesus, how deep does this conspiracy go!
Ooohhhhh… it’s IN the computer…
Spreading FUD over a group of people’s intent with their software that they personally use is an odd take, when kbin could very well have similar vulnerabilities in its codebase. Federation is good as part of limiting the attack vector one of many implementations and a subset of all servers hosting and routing media content. Kbin is just another set of federated content servers, with there being no guarantee of who develops the software being inherently more competent than those who develop Lemmy.
This is hardly a back door. The lemmy devs just screwed up.
Kbin had a fix for an SQL injection exploit the other week. Both probably still have security holes that haven’t yet been identified.
There are more eyes on the software as the userbase grows, and people are going to find more flaws. That’s just the way things go.
I literally said it wasn’t in my comment, it’s evidence of how easy it is to put one in down the line despite the fact this is open source software.
You must not understand how open source works
Well he absolutely must learn how open source works.
But he doesn’t understand how it works.
(Sorry for the correction…)
This is a ridiculous take and fairly toxic. Don’t ruin any communities with unnecessary hate. It’s unwanted.
What are you referring to here?
the lemmy devs are open communists. that’s it lol
Wow that is extremely irrelevant
yeah, kind of insane the grudge people hold about it, people like that user spread all these spooky posts about how the devs are communists coming to kill you or something and that’s why you should use kbin (I’m only slightly exaggerating, the way these people post about it makes it sound like the devs are directly involved with like human rights abuses or something lol)
The Lemmy devs are ideological fans of communist China.
They’re likely to cooperate with them down the line and take actions that compromise their software, send data to others who are in their circle, and so on and so forth.
A lot of people say since Lemmy is open source you can trust it, but open source isn’t a protection against malicious code. Here you can see an example of just how easy it is to sneak something by. Even though this wasn’t a malicious example it still allowed admin accounts to be compromised
You seem to be coming up with conspiracy theories, don’t you?
And you don’t seem to know how (developing) software works, and that people aren’t infallible when it comes to avoiding bugs.
Popularity just also increases the attack surface to a project, all these bugs can absolutely also occur in kbin. Unless software is mathematically proven (which is practically impossible in this context), it’s always possible that there is a bug lurking around the corner.
I’m literally a professional software developer.
I’m also telling you that people are fallible, bugs are easily missed, and you shouldn’t trust a project to be secure just because it’s open source.
Yes.
And kbin doesn’t have developers that have reason to attempt to create and support malicious code. You can trust them to at least attempt to keep the code base clean in good faith. You can’t trust Lemmy to do the same.
Why shouldn’t I trust Lemmy?
I mean the devs are now finally able to finance themselves via donations, after years of work on a project I’ve always aspired to make (but don’t have the necessary drive and time for it). There are also a lot more developers now with lemmy.
Just because you obviously don’t share their political view, doesn’t mean that they don’t want this thing to be censorship-resistant and impossible to take down (no matter whether it’s a left or right authoritarian state/entity). They are closer to anarchism and marxism, than they’re to Chinas (authoritarian) version of “communism” (as the right wing media likes to simplify this rather complex topic…).
Everyone is more or less political, but it’s far fetched to allege the conspiracy that the devs are working together with the chinese government or something weird like that.
They are literally ideologically aligned with a state that runs the largest mass censorship program in the world.
Doesn’t help. They’re still potentially malicious actors.
It’s just a sliiiight bit more extreme than a small difference.
I also love how you’re jumping goal posts here after your other point totally failed to land.
They literally regularly praise and support China through their moderation and consider negative talk about China western propaganda.
Like you’re on the other side of the spectrum (i.e. Nazi)?
Yeah in that sense everyone is a potential malicious actor, but it’s much less likely if all the code is publicly visible (open source), that this happens. Now especially as there are now a lot more people watching over the code and potentially future contributions (code review).
I trust these guys a lot more than most politicians or big companies (whether they’re obviously authoritarian like in china, russia or “democratic” like in the USA). Transparency is a much more important factor than ideology/political views IMHO (e.g. they could publicly claim that they’re rightwing, while they’re tankies and vice versa).
But to me all your comments feel like rootless conspiracy anyway…
No, I would consider them being a bunch of Nazis just as bad. Any idealistically extreme group should never ever ever control platforms like these in any way.
Cheap ass copout reasoning there. You’re still trusting code you shouldn’t.
I know you’re getting it from all angles right now, but
Do you have a source for their support of Communist China? I know they’re purported communist, but I didn’t notice any outright support of the Chinese form of communism.
Not trying to argue, but genuinely trying to stay informed
I think to get the best view of their political stance is to read dessalines essays.
Thank you for the link. It’s interesting to see a lot of these points. It’s a massive undertaking, and is illuminating to see the other side of the coin, as it were.
Too much to go through in one sitting but a lot to swallow
Check out lemmy.ml, which is the devs instance. You’ll see it very quickly.
McCarthy, is that you?
Tbf, there are far more pressing reasons for distrusting Tankies… Instances getting hacked is for sure aggravating, but it isn’t the gulag-backed paranoid ultra-corrupt authoritarian hellhole they so admire and wish to expand globally.
I don’t know that they actually like America that much, if at all.
One is a step to the other.
I’m sure kbin.social blocks lemmygrad, but in case it doesn’t: you are such a dork, please learn to not be a dork in the future. Thank you.
This is just getting too big too fast.
Lots of things change when you grow too fast, one of them is that any stupid failure will be found and exploited.
The project will mature and get a better security process, that has nothing to do with politics.
Its open source and a lot of people are looking at it. The odds it has a back door intentionally put there are slim to none. It would get noticed.
Did they catch this?
Don’t know, I don’t have enough information. Though my point were if it were intentional. I am going to hazard a guess by how they are scrambling to send out patches that it probably wasn’t intended by the creators.
The kind of developers that would put a back door in their software probably are also working on things with far more value potential than an open source forum where they could easily be caught. Perhaps like banks or weapons depots.
No. They didn’t catch this. It compromised an administrator on a massive instance.
It wasn’t intentional. It proves that when it is intentional it’ll be easily done and it’s a mistake to trust the Lemmy code base.
And the problem was fixed right afterwards and is currently being pushed out for admins to update to. Look, like it or not, shit happens. Expecting it to be full proof is unrealistic. It is a young software.
Just because it happened unintentionally, doesn’t prove that we can’t trust the developers to not put back doors in. Even if they did, why would they? What is there to gain for the developers adding a backdoor to it? Versus the risk of doing so? Is it ever worth the trouble when it is very much possible to find out if they did?
Lemmy has no financial value. That is the point. We don’t use credit cards here, people rarely use their names, email verification isn’t mandatory on all instances, passwords are potentially useful but you still need to know who they belong to. It is just such a great risk to their reputation for such a small gain.
Which is expected. When it comes to security the fact it happened at all is the problem.
I don’t expect the software to be fool proof. All software has bugs and problems, but this software is specifically developed by bad actors who will eventually use the platform to fuck you over.
The developers aren’t trustworthy on the account of their extremist ideology, not on account of this bug happening. This bug is evidence that despite the fact that this project is open source you should not just brush off that extremist ideal as “no big deal”.
And immense social value.
Why would they build the platform open source if they wanted to put a back door in it? Go touch grass you shut in.
We can argue non stop about politics, but that isn’t the point. Whether or not we agree with their politics is irrelevant to their ability to build a social platform. Until we start to see their beliefs affecting their software decision making in a negative way, we cannot complain about it. As they may or may not have popular opinions, that is a very good reason for them to have a great platform. So they can share them without fear of retaliation.
However, they have so far done nothing to show they can’t be trusted to not make unbiased or malicious software. It is incredibly rude to assume they will.
If you have evidence showing they cannot be trusted, please come forth with it. We need to know it.
You’ll be about a billion days too late and the entire network will have been compromised for ages. You don’t operate on a “oh let’s just trust the authoritarian communists until they do something bad” policy.
What do you mean by that? Are they hell bent on using Rust Nightly and making overly-judicious use of
.unwrap()?edit: I see that you mean they are Marxist-adjacent.
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Lmao you very clearly have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.
I dislike tankies myself, but this was absolutely not a backdoor.
I literally said this wasn’t in my comment. This is evidence of how easy it is to sneak in a back door.
This comment further underlines to me that you have absolutely no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.
You’re out of your element, Donny.
And you’re aggressively confidently wrong. Evidence by the fact that you give literally zero reasoning.
The fact a bug like this can happen is clear and obvious evidence for how these things can happen, and this was just stupidity, not targeted malice.
Lmao go touch grass my guy.
It’s not a backdoor. It wasn’t malicious. Yes, some major contributors are tankies, but that doesn’t really matter. That’s the beauty of OSS: everyone can see the code, which means everyone can spot sketchy shit - either malicious or completely accidental - and fix it. The fact that a patch was published in a matter of literally hours is confirmation of this.
If this was a malicious exploit, it’d have been obscured far more, it would likely encompass more than a handful of insecure data-handling statements, and we’d have seen a LOT more instances getting popped.
Read my comment again. I literally said this wasn’t. I said this is experience that it could be easily done in the future.
Didn’t help in this case. Open Source doesn’t fix malicious contributions, and when the project owners are the malicious source your have no safeguards. Trust is still essential.
Ex-fucking-xactly
I’m not going to litigate the entire topic of trust within the context of software and systems engineering with you.
This is the sort of Reddit interaction that I don’t miss.
“I’m going going to explain why you’re clearly wrong and I’m clearly right because that would open me up to making arguments that can actually be argued against”.
You treat open source like it’s a magic sprinkle to get trustworthy code. It isn’t, and when malicious actors control the code base and write the majority of the code it is hilariously easy to sneak many bugs in over the years. Even projects like Linux, run by people you can actually trust, have issues with third party contributors despite incredibly rigerous approval process.
I’m damn well aware of how this works, and you believe open source gives you security that simply does not exist.