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.
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.
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.
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.
Alright, so what do they plan to do? Compromise Lemmy, sure. Then what? What do they gain? Propaganda?
Basically pull data on various accounts (IP address, activity history, etc), people, and trends. They could promote given posts or suppress posts or hide things from moderators. They could distribute whatever malware they might like, target specific accounts that way…
The possibilities are many.
That’s not what it means at all. All software is subject to critical security vulnerabilities. Acting like one incident proves it can never be trusted makes you seem naive because any OS you’d be posting from has definitely been compromised worse, substantially more frequently. By your own rubric you shouldn’t be using software, period.