Microsoft has started adding short life VMs. No idea if that's good. Both MS and Apple offer their App stores with more locked down experiences though I'm sad they conflate app security and app markets.

Basically anytime I run any software, everytime I run "make" or "npm install" or "pip install" or download a game on Steam etc I'm having to trust 1000s of strangers they aren't downloading my keys, my photos, my docs, etc...

I think you should be in control of your machine but IMO it's time to default to locked down instead of defaulting to open.

You listed it, the problem is personal data.

If an executable nuke my computer it’s a pain but if they don’t have access to my data it’s not that severe. For a long time we conflated the two, being hacked / getting a virus meant you got downtime, and you were screwed if you didn’t have backup, but it stopped here.

But really what changed in recent years in threat level is how much personal informations are in computers, and classic security models were not thought with that in mind. There is no « personal data » flag, just a permission it belongs to a user. It worked fine for executables and working documents, but personal data are a different thing.

Technically on many OSs you already have dozens of ways to achieve what you're saying. You could spawn a VM, use a different user, use some container framework, use SELinux, etc... The problem is that usability is generally terrible. Or maybe not terrible but bad enough that many people will start mashing the "allow" button indiscriminately when they're in a hurry and want the thing to Just Work. There's only one thing I know for sure how to do with SELinux without having to lookup a guide or manual, it's how to disable it.

Look at the modern Linux desktop for instance, you need admin privileges to configure a printer but your sensitive private files are just lying on your home directory with user privileges. That makes no sense.

This is not really a technical problem, that was solved when we invented the MMU, it's an UI problem.

I'd also prefer the default to be VM-ish. Right now I have 275 projects in my /home/me/src folder. Every one of them has at least a build process that executes code I have mostly not reviewed. Many of them execute more code after being built. Some of them execute code when they were installed for dependencies. Maybe I'm just not used to it but I'd really like if the process for isolating all 275 of those projects was somehow easier. Or maybe I'd prefer they were all isolated by default and that we could work on ways of making them easy to do the things they really need to do and hard/discouraged to do anything that would also be a security issue.

Maybe people have suggestions. I don't want an actual VM if it means I have to install 275 copies of OSes and 275 sets of semi global dependencies (like I don't want to have to install python 3.8 200 times) but I do want all 275 of those projects not to be able to read my private keys or my photos etc or write outside designated areas

On top of that the one app I'd like to sandbox more is obviously the web browser, but since nowadays web browsers are like a full OS on top of another it's really hard to finely grain permissions unless you want one profile per website. The browser needs access to the filesystem if you want to upload and download files, the graphics card if you want good performance and webgl, the sound API if you want audio, the ability to fullscreen if you want to be able to play games and videos that way, the printer if you want to print stuff, the USB stack if you want to use security tokens etc...

Note that you need to secure your X-Server also, especially when sharing your network-namespace... (as it might be configured to authenticate your uid on (anonymous) sockets)

E.g.,

https://www.twistlock.com/labs-blog/escaping-docker-containe...

https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/46978

Full virtualisation does far better, though I believe there've been exploits there as well. Yes, from 2015:

https://threatpost.com/xen-patches-7-year-old-vm-escape-hype...

Source: I've found a fair few Docker breakouts. I also maintain runc, which is the lower-level container runtime component (where most of the breakouts are found).

One conceptual model that has worked to some degree on mobile platforms is the idea that programs not users have permissions.

But mobile platforms are overdoing it in a way that makes data centric work impractical.

I'm not quite sure how to overcome these issues, but I feel that making the distinction between permissions assigned to users vs permissions assigned to programs more explicit and more visible could take us a step further.

Standard unix permissions could technically do this by creating a bunch of ghost accounts pairing the two, but it gets messy fast. Something closer to access lists makes more sense? I dunno. This is a curious problem, and my ideas are half-baked. Is there any activity in this space outside of mobile?

Not for an amount of time that is firmly outside "modern."

But that's not really my point anyway, the point is that the cupsd process runs sandboxed with its own permissions while my text editor, my password manager and my web browser all share the same UID. If there's a security vulnerability in Firefox and some attacker manages to hack my printer it's pretty bad. If they hack my password manager it's really, really bad.

That's true, but what it primarily suggests to me is that Firefox should be sandboxed. It seems possible that the main reason cupsd runs in a sandbox is that it's a source of attacks on you, not a target. (Why is it pretty bad if someone else hacks your printer?)

Firefox is a plentiful source of attacks on you. Your password manager isn't -- it already knows all your passwords; you trust it by necessity.

The password manager is a high-value target, and might (does) deserve extra protections for that reason, but the parallel in your example runs between cups and Firefox, not cups and the password manager.

On my desktop root doesn't really matter, if my user gets compromised it's already game over. I have a lot more to lose if by browser gets backdoored that if my /etc/shadow gets leaked.

I heard the same complaints when we went from Apple II to Macintosh, from 68K to PPC, from Finder to MultiFinder, from OS 9 to OS X, and so on. At each stage, the CPU and RAM became less of a free-for-all and more of a system where you were only allowed certain operations. (Yeah, protected memory is terrible for hacking! Sorry.)

And yet, somehow, we survived. Security got better, and usability (generally) got much better in other areas to compensate. Life is better all around when you can tell the computer accurately what you mean, instead of relying on your ability to jump across layers willy-nilly.

You're describing possible solutions using current technologies. None of those (except perhaps "users", in some form) are inherent to the design of a security model. We only have them because they were a convenient way to implement our current security model on top of the operating systems we've got now. At some point, we aren't going to be solve all our problems by adding more layers to a 1972 design. I can think of many security models which could offer better usability than SELinux or "mashing the 'allow' button".

When I pip install paramiko, I do, in fact, want it to have access to my SSH keys. When I pip install ansible, I want ansible to be able to shell out to OpenSSH to use my keys. If I write custom Python code that calls gpg, I want that custom code to be able to load libraries that I've pip installed without the gpg subprocess being blocked from loading my keys. If I have a backup client in Python, and I tell it to back up my entire home directory, I want it backing up my entire home directory including private keys.

If I wanted an OS where I couldn't install arbitrary code and have it get to all my files for my own good, I'd use iOS. (I do, in fact, use iOS on my phone because I sometimes want this. But when I'm writing Python code, I don't.)

SELinux has been able to solve the problem of "if a policy says X can't get to Y, prevent X from getting to Y" for years. Regular UNIX permissions have been doing the same for decades. (Yes, SELinux and regular UNIX permissions take a different approach / let you write the policy differently, but that's the problem they're fundamentally solving; given a clear description of who to deny access to, deny this access.) Neither SELinux nor UNIX permissions nor anything else has solved the problem of "Actually, in this circumstance I mean for X to get to Y, but in that circumstance I don't, and this is obvious to a human but there's no clear programmable distinction between the cases."

To be clear - I think there is potentially something of a hybrid approach between the status quo and what newer OSes do. For instance, imagine if each virtualenv were its own sandboxed environment (which could be "SELinux context" or could just be "UNIX user account") and so if you're writing code in one project, things you pip install have access to that code but not your whole user account. I'm just saying that SELinux hasn't magically solved this problem because all it provides is tools you could use to solve it, not a solution itself.

Do you? Wouldn't it be better if Paramiko was obliged to access your keys via the agent? Then we could secure the agent (there's more work to be done here anyway) and also it fixes problems where Paramiko wants to do something that the agent could facilitate (and so works with plain ssh) but Paramiko doesn't know about yet, like using a FIDO device to get a key.

One of the obvious things the agent could do on a workstation is mention that your keys are being used. Imagine you run a job, which reaches out via Paramiko to fifteen servers, you see a brief notification saying the agent signed 15 logins for Paramiko. That makes sense. An hour later, reading the TPS reports, the agent notifies you again, Paramiko just signed another login. Huh? Now you're triggered to investigate what happened and why instead of it just silently happening and you read a press piece in a month about how a new version of Paramiko is off-siting your keys because bad guys broke into a GitHub repo or whatever.

That's just kicking the can down the road. You get the same exact problem, but with the agent permissions rather than the actual keys.

The problem is "I installed paramiko and I know what it does and I want it to access my SSH credentials, but I don't want evillib123 to access my SSH credentials even though I have installed it as well and I think I know what it does, but I am mistaken" and the distinction between the two cases above is in the intent and judging intent is hard.

> One of the obvious things the agent could do on a workstation is mention that your keys are being used

This has been tried many times. Windows UAC is one of the more ubiquitous and notorious examples. If everything starts sending you notifications you stop paying attention to them. That is what happened to UAC, it would notify users about important things, software installs, system setting changes, admin accesses etc. but it was doing it too much and most people would just click through without actually reading what the notification is about. And the reason it was doing it too much is because it cannot judge intent. It cannot tell the difference between me installing an application deliberately and me installing an application because I was tricked into it somehow.

This is also importantly wrong in a subtle way. If evillib123 steals a SSH private key, that key isn't private any more and my only option is to revoke the key and make a new one. Nothing else works, they have the key and can authenticate as me as often as they like whenever they like until that key's access is revoked.

But if they only have permission to get the agent to do operations their ability to authenticate is limited by the agent. If they lose access to the agent they can't authenticate any more. That would happen if I uninstall their malware, or if the agent locks access of its own accord (e.g. it's common to auto-lock after suspending a machine or locking the screen) or if the machine is just switched off altogether.

I'm talking about notifications not interruptions. At most a toast message, much more likely just a small indicator lights up. Not a big deal - when you'd expect it.

Think about the turn indicator on the dashboard of your car. When you indicate one way or the other a lamp illuminates, on and off, sympathetic to (and in older models directly run by the same relays as) the external turn lamps. But it doesn't ask you to confirm. "Are you really turning Left? Yes/ No" and since you're expecting it you hardly notice. But, imagine you're on the highway and suddenly that lamp illuminates for no apparent reason. That's weird right? You might be too busy to do anything about it immediately, but you'd now be concerned that perhaps there's a problem. Good!

That's what I'm talking about. Yes, out of a million users whose key got abused, maybe 90% of them weren't looking at the screen when it happened and 90% of those left were too busy or didn't understand why it was strange, and 90% of those who noticed never actually investigated and 90% those who investigated give up without notifying anyone about this weird phenomenon... you've still got a hundred users complaining about the problem.

It's not a solution, but it's a warning system.

In the mobile space you get prompts for soooo many things, and loads of people see "ask for location data" and say no when they think it shouldn't be used! The system works!

Do you have any non-anecdotal evidence for this?

I see loads of articles about people talking around permissions. Much much more than for tools on desktop computers. I believe that the higher visibility makes people noticing much more likely.

Of course the hypothetical "don't care" person won't notice.... but definitionally they won't ever notice!

I think it's fairly undisputed that the little lights on webcams that are on when the camera is enabled has totally worked, and the location service blue bar on iOS has worked well too IMO.

That's the problem, though. How do you secure the agent? How do you make sure that the program talking to the agent is doing something good and not evil with the request?

Yes, there is some defense-in-depth advantage to making this change, but the thing you're trying to solve here is that you can pip install thing X and have thing X run ssh with your credentials if thing X isn't evil, and you want to automatically determine whether it's evil.

> Imagine you run a job, which reaches out via Paramiko to fifteen servers, you see a brief notification saying the agent signed 15 logins for Paramiko. That makes sense. An hour later, reading the TPS reports, the agent notifies you again, Paramiko just signed another login. Huh?

That seems like it defeats only the most naive malware. Why wouldn't the malicious Python module sit around and wait for you to make a legitimate SSH connection? Would you notice if your agent signed 16 connections instead of 15? (What if it made one of the requests time out so it kept it at 15 notifications?)

Remember that the problem you're trying to solve is to prevent arbitrary code from being evil. This is basically equivalent to the antivirus problem, and there's a long history of appealing-sounding, naive, and ultimately useless solutions to the antivirus problem.

There is relatively little incentive to just "be evil". But much more incentive for certain specific intents that are evil, and so if we can make those trickier we get most of the benefit without solving the impossible problem.

This happens elsewhere in society. We put a bunch of effort into deterring car theft, but crooks could also steal mailboxes, or shrubs from your garden, or garbage. They mostly don't though because there's no incentive - in your city chances are you can find somebody who'll take a stolen car off your hands for cash, but good luck finding anybody who can pay you for a dozen stolen rose bushes.

Likewise I doubt that there's a healthy market for "Sometimes you might with no prior notice get to SSH into a target machine". Even the raw SSH private keys being stolen here are a pretty niche product, I think the actual authentication privilege itself, rather than the raw keys, is so much harder to exploit profitably that it won't sell.

That doesn't mean nobody would do this, but it makes it into a targeted attack. Think "organised gang break into one family home to kidnap a bank manager as part of a scheme to get into the vault" not "burglars break into homes across the city to steal jewellery". We don't fix the problem, but we do greatly mitigate the impact on most of the population.

Dependencies are bad.

Every single dependency in your code is a liability, a security loophole, a potential legal risk, and a time sink.

Every dependency needs to be audited and evaluated, and all the changes on every update reviewed. Otherwise who knows what got injected into your code?

Evaluating each dependency for potential risk is important. How much coding time is this saving? Would it, in fact, be quicker to just write that code yourself? Can you vendor it and cut out features you don't need? How many other people use this? Is it supported by its original maintainer? Does it have a deep-pocketed maintainer that could be an alternative target for legal claims?

Mostly, people don't do that and just "import antigravity" without wondering if there's a free lunch in there...

s/dependency/application/g in your comment. Dependencies are just applications that are controlled through code rather than via a mouse/keyboard. They're not special.

I run a minimal Arch setup at home for my development machine, partially for security/reliability reasons -- less software means fewer chances for something to go wrong. But this is a band-aide fix. A minimal Arch setup that forgoes modern niceties like a graphical file browser is not a general-purpose solution to software security.

When someone comes to me and says that an app is stealing their iOS contacts behind their back, my response isn't, "well, its your own fault for installing apps in the first place. Apps are bad." My response is to say that iOS apps shouldn't have access to contacts without explicit permission.

The same is true of language dependencies. Both users and developers need the ability to run untrusted code. The emphasis on "try your hardest not to install anything" is (very temporarily) good advice, but it's ultimately counterproductive and harmful if it distracts us from solving the root issues.

But until we can provide a form of static analysis that can tell you whether a dependency is malicious or not, we're stuck either manually auditing them, or not using them.

There's very little to choose between a user coming to you saying "I ran a bad application" and "I ran a bad application and clicked on the allow button because I had no way of knowing it was a bad application and I have to allow all applications". Users are notorious for defeating access permissions. Implementing this same bad solution on developers isn't going to work.

The solution most people seem to be talking about is sandboxing imports off into containers (sandboxes, whatever - these will end up as containers) so that they can have their access to sensitive data and API's controlled. These aren't "code dependencies" any more, these are "runtime services". It implicitly conforms to "dependencies are bad" by forcing all dependencies to be external services. But it doesn't allow you to actually import known-good dependencies from trusted sources.

And specifically granting access permissions to code has always worked before, right? I mean, people never just click "allow" all the time so they're not bothered by security dialogs, do they? Why are we talking about implementing such a proven-bad solution yet again?

To be clear, is your argument that it's too hard for us to teach people to avoid granting unnecessary permissions, but not too hard for us to teach users not to install any software in the first place?

Educating users about permissions is hard, convincing users not to download anything is impossible.

Developers will just allow the bad code access to the things it says it needs, because it says it needs them. Meanwhile we have another sandbox layer to deal with, which isn't good.

We need to reduce the proliferation of dependencies, and only use them for important things, to reduce the attack surface. And we need to tighten up the package managers so typosquatting and duplication of interfaces is flagged (if not banned), and we need some kind of static analysis that flags what capabilities a library uses. And I'm sure there's lots more ways of solving it that I can't think of here.

What you're proposing here is infinitely harder than teaching users to be responsible with permissions. If you can't teach a developer not to grant code access to everything it asks for, you are not going to be able to teach them to install fewer dependencies. It just won't happen, it's completely unrealistic.

A lot of the solutions you're proposing have significant downsides, or they don't scale. Static analysis is great, but doesn't work in highly dynamic languages like Python, Javascript, and Lisp. It also can't handle ambiguously malicious behavior, like device fingerprinting. Static analysis is just a worse version of sandboxing with more holes and more guesswork. Manual reviews don't scale at all -- they're even more unrealistic of a solution than trusting developers to be frugal about the code they install. Tightening package names is nice, but again, not a silver bullet. Sometimes official libraries with official names go bad as well. We have a lot of solutions like this that we can observe in the wild, and they don't really work very well. Google Play still has malware, even though Google says they review apps and remove fraudulent submissions.

On the other hand, we actually have pretty good evidence that sandboxing at least helps -- namely, iOS and the web. Sandboxing isn't perfect, it's a very complicated UX/UI problem that I consider still somewhat unsolved. But, iOS is making decent progress here. Their recent permission reminder system periodically asks users if they want to continue granting permissions to an app -- that's really smart design. The web has also been making excellent progress for a long time. The web has a lot of flaws, but it is a gold standard for user-accessible sandboxing. Nobody thinks twice about clicking on a random link in Twitter, because they don't have to. There's obviously still a lot that needs to improve, but if the primary concern we had about malicious packages on PyPi was that they might mine bitcoin in the background, that would be a very large improvement over stealing SSH keys.

The reason sandboxing is so good is specifically because it shifts blame. Shifting blame is great. With the current situation, I need to audit the code and do research for every single app I install on my PC -- I have to decide whether the author is trustworthy. If the author isn't trustworthy, there's nothing I can do other than avoid their app entirely. This is complicated because trust isn't binary. So I can't just separate authors into "good" and "bad" categories, I have to grade them on a curve.

I do this. It's exhausting. A system where I manage permissions instead of granting each codebase a binary "trusted" label would be a massive improvement to my life, and it's crazy to me that people are in effect saying that we should keep dependencies terrible and exhausting for everyone just because the solution won't help users who are already going to ignore safeguards and install malware anyway.

Imagine if when multiuser systems were first proposed for Unix, somebody said, "yeah, but everyone's just going to grant sudo willy-nilly or share passwords, so why even separate accounts? Instead, we should encourage network admins to minimize the number of people with access to a remote system to just one or two." The current NodeJS sandboxing proposals would mean that when I import a library, I can globally restrict its permissions and its dependencies' permissions in something like 3 lines of code -- the whole thing is completely under my control. The alternative is I spend hours trying to figure out if it's safe to import. How is that better?

But I don't use dependencies like that. I'm mostly just importing useful functions from a library. Having to sandbox that function away from the rest of my code is not going to work. I'll end up copy/pasting the code into my project to avoid that.

Sandboxing might be something like, "I'm importing a function, and I'm going to define a scope, and within that scope, it will have access to these methods, and nothing else." Imagine the following pseudo-code in a fictional, statically typed, rigid langauge.

  import std from 'std';
  import disk from 'io';
  import request from 'http';

  //This dependency (and its sub-dependencies) can
  //only call methods in the std library, nothing else.
  //I can call special_sort anywhere I want and I *know*
  //it can't make network requests or access the disk.
  //All it can do is call a few core std libraries.
  import (std){ special_sort } from 'shady_special_sort';

  function save (data) {
    disk.write('output.log', data);
  }

  function safe_save (data) {
    if (!valid(data)) { return false; }
    save(data);
  }

  function main () {
    //An on-the-fly sandbox -- access to safe_save and request.
    (request, safe_save){
      save('my_malware_payload'); //compile-time error
      disk.write('output.log', 'my_malware_payload'); //compile-time error
      safe_save('my_malware_payload'); //allowed
    }
  }

The difference between this and pure static analysis is that static analysis isn't something that's built into the language, and static analysis tries to guess intent. Static analysis says, "that looks shifty, let's alert someone." An language-level sandbox says, "I don't care about the intent, you have access to X and that's it."

Even in a dynamic language like JS, when people talk about stuff like the Realms proposal[0][1], they're talking about a system that's a lot closer to the above than they are about creating standalone services that would live in their own processes or threads.

This kind of style of thinking about security lends itself particularly well to functional languages and functional coding styles, but there's no reason it can't also work with more traditional class-based approaches as well -- you just have to be more careful about what you're passing around and what has access to what objects.

  class Dangerous () {
    unsafe_write (data) {
       //unvalidated disk access
    }
  }

  class Safe () {
    public Dangerous ref = new Dangerous();
    safe_write (data) {
       validate(data);
       ref.unsafe_write();
    }
  }

  function main () {
    Dangerous instance = new Dangerous();

    (instance){
      //I've just accidentally given my sandbox
      //access to `unsafe_write` because I left
      //a property public.
    }
  }

[0]: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-realms

[1]: https://gist.github.com/dherman/7568885

To give up this kind of modularity and relying on other software engineers' work would throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Sure you need to apply judgement about whether a library seems legit, but the other end of the spectrum is the not-invented-here attitude, which is also bad.

Just saying that "Dependencies are bad" means people are more likely to cut and paste that algorithm or bit of code into your application rather than taking it from some sort of package. In this sense you also do not know that it is a dependency, and you do not get any updates or bug fixes for it either.

Have to be careful about those unintended consequences there.

It at least pushes the boundary to I want to allow X program to access Y instead of I want to allow X user to access Y.

Using a user account per-app only really works elegantly on single user systems where there are a small number of apps.

bob-firefox, bob-vim, alice-evolution, alice-calculator,... would be a nightmare to maintain compared to being able to apply policy to the program itself.

This is how Android works, btw. Each app has its own UID.

And the standard SELinux policies don't solve this problem, anyway - when there are a small number of apps, you can give them each a context, but maintaining one for hundreds or thousands of apps is a nightmare. For web serving itself, quoting from https://linux.die.net/man/8/httpd_selinux :

    The following process types are defined for httpd:*

    httpd_cvs_script_t, httpd_rotatelogs_t, httpd_bugzilla_script_t, httpd_smokeping_cgi_script_t, httpd_nagios_script_t, httpd_dirsrvadmin_script_t, httpd_suexec_t, httpd_php_t, httpd_w3c_validator_script_t, httpd_user_script_t, httpd_awstats_script_t, httpd_apcupsd_cgi_script_t, httpd_nutups_cgi_script_t, httpd_munin_script_t, httpd_openshift_script_t, httpd_sys_script_t, httpd_dspam_script_t, httpd_prewikka_script_t, httpd_git_script_t, httpd_unconfined_script_t, httpd_t, httpd_helper_t, httpd_squid_script_t, httpd_cobbler_script_t, httpd_mediawiki_script_t*

I don't think even your examples are obvious to everyone. For example, if paramiko is installed as a dependency of something else, it's not clear that you want to grant it access to your keys. Further, you might want to grant access to some but not all keys. There are many nuances that are unique to the particular use case which I don't think are obvious. However, that doesn't explain the inability of tools to allow us to describe these relationships.

With a bit of work, the tech behind that could be made to work reasonably well in a general purpose linux distribution like say Fedora.

It's also kind of hilarious when the person downloading and executing random code off the internet isn't the naive user, the pointy haired boss, the stereotypical grandmother, the dumb tween, but the "sophisticated", computer-savvy, net-wise programmers.

You don't want to instal "some library, from somewhere" to have automatically access to everything on your machine.

I also agree with all people that comment that it is solved problem in technical means. I someone installs random stuff it is like crossing street with closed eyes, you might not get hit by a car, but yeah chances are much higher then if you take your time and look around what you are doing.

You could argue that the user should know what they're doing, but then, drivers shouldn't crash cars, and pilots shouldn't crash aircraft.

Numerous elements of this problem are simply hard, perhaps impossible to resolve. If the problem is what Neal Stephonson called metaphor shear in "In the Beginning Was the Command Line", then the fundamental problem isn't technical, but that people generally are operating under a false mental model of what computers are, can do, and do behave.

Yes, "all models are false, some are useful". The utility of this one may be past its sell-by date.

    $ virtualenv foo
    Running virtualenv with interpreter /usr/bin/python2
    New python executable in /home/administrator/foo/bin/python2
    Also creating executable in /home/administrator/foo/bin/python
    Installing setuptools, pkg_resources, pip, wheel...done.

    $ ls -la foo/bin
    total 3464
    drwxrwxr-x 2 administrator administrator    4096 Dec  4 11:06 .
    drwxrwxr-x 7 administrator administrator    4096 Dec  4 11:06 ..
    -rw-rw-r-- 1 administrator administrator    2082 Dec  4 11:06 activate
    -rw-rw-r-- 1 administrator administrator    1024 Dec  4 11:06 activate.csh
    -rw-rw-r-- 1 administrator administrator    2222 Dec  4 11:06 activate.fish
    -rw-rw-r-- 1 administrator administrator    1137 Dec  4 11:06 activate_this.py
    -rwxrwxr-x 1 administrator administrator     252 Dec  4 11:06 easy_install
    -rwxrwxr-x 1 administrator administrator     252 Dec  4 11:06 easy_install-2.7
    -rwxrwxr-x 1 administrator administrator     239 Dec  4 11:06 pip
    -rwxrwxr-x 1 administrator administrator     239 Dec  4 11:06 pip2
    -rwxrwxr-x 1 administrator administrator     239 Dec  4 11:06 pip2.7
    lrwxrwxrwx 1 administrator administrator       7 Dec  4 11:06 python -> python2
    -rwxrwxr-x 1 administrator administrator 3492656 Dec  4 11:06 python2
    lrwxrwxrwx 1 administrator administrator       7 Dec  4 11:06 python2.7 -> python2
    -rwxrwxr-x 1 administrator administrator    2341 Dec  4 11:06 python-config
    -rwxrwxr-x 1 administrator administrator     230 Dec  4 11:06 wheel

You're right about virtualenv. I don't realy use that anymore, the venv module added in 3.3 gets the job done. And that does default to symlinks for posix. https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3.8/Lib/venv/__init__...

Things today:

- Protective monitoring. If it's stealing your key, it's presumably sending it somewhere, so somebody alerting should be going off asking clients are calling something external.

- Peer review. Maybe its about time we question whether we should actually be running so many random modules without actually vendoring and reading the code.

- Subscribing to security lists, so the people who actually do the above stop you from using dirty modules.

- Yubikeys, etc.

Things in the future:

- New home directory model. I believe systemd crew are looking into this, so I imagine it'll be hated, even if it does help solve similar issues.

- Newer distro models such as fedora silverblue where every process is isolated. I believe this currently mounts your home directory though, so maybe wouldn't work.

- New FS layout. Putting .ssh keys in something like .secret/ssh would likely make it easier to not mount secrets into isolated processes and help MACs too.

Monitoring is also something that requires expertise, and therefor is something only companies are really going to benefit from. Individual users are not equipped to do this.

The problem is a tragedy of the commons in where we expect everyone else to do this for us and nobody does. This is why we need to rely on our own developers to actually do the reviewing, and why we have the monitoring to identify when that fails.

The more ways you attack the problem, the less likely you're going to be completely owned by a failure. Obviously sticking to a small number of generally trusted popular packages will likely make it easier to establish trust than using 1500 of them.

Obviously all this allies to other layers, such as Linux, your cloud provider, your hardware, your CI/CD, your secrets manager.

It becomes much more manageable when you go all-in on SELinux from the outset, rather than trying to bolt it on after-the-fact.

I don't know what the solution is but it feels like this is a much bigger issue and we need some rethinking of how OSes work by default. Apple has taken some steps it seems the last 2 MacOS updates where they block access to certain folders for lots of executables until the user specifically gives that permission. Unfortunately for things like python the permission is granted to the Terminal app so once given, all programs running under the terminal inherit the permissions.

I fully agree. It seems that the UNIX model is not very compatible with the macOS permission system, but one could imagine defining multiple types of shell sessions, each with its own set of permissions.

[1] https://www.nitrokey.com/ [2] https://salsa.debian.org/gnuk-team/gnuk/gnuk

I know what you meant to type but, for the benefit of everyone else here, he meant OpenSSH.

(Normally I wouldn't comment just to correct a typo as the intention is usually obvious but this is a bit different.)

Indeed. Same for gnuk keys. I currently use a gnuk key (Nitrokey Start) with Ed25519 and have GPG set up as the SSH agent for SSH. Though I hope to switch to a YubiKey soon, so that I don't need a separate key for U2F/Fido2.

The other advantage is that you can use the cheap U2F/Fido yubikeys without GPG/applet support.

The best way to keep it offline is to make a paper backup with the paperkey tool and store it in a safe:

http://www.jabberwocky.com/software/paperkey/

In addition to this, it's a good idea to QR encode the key. QR codes are quickly and easily restored with a laptop camera and they support even 4096 bit RSA keys.

The zbarcam program can be used for this purpose but current versions have binary data decoding problems and aren't easy to interface with. I sent some patches to that fix these problems but they haven't been reviewed yet:

https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/pull/64

https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/pull/60

They also entirely prevent various compromises:

* Theft or loss of the laptop does not mean loss of token.

* Even if the token gets lost, cracking it will be hard. A dedicated attacker might be able to do it, but a 6 digit pin with 3 tries is hard to guess. Decapping and convincing a yubikey to reveal the secret key is likely possible, but nontrivial.

* Attacks where the attacker can read files do not turn into a compromise of key material.

* Even a compromise that allows code execution would require a sophisticated attacker to pivot: You'd need to figure out how to make good use of the acces gained either in a fully automated fashion or be online when the victim has its token plugged in. You cannot collect the key and later figure out what to do. This pretty much rules out attacks such as the one we're discussing here.

So while they do not protect against a full persistent compromise, there are quite a few cases that they do protect against.

Doesn't seem relevant when you probably have FDE enabled.

>* Even if the token gets lost, cracking it will be hard. A dedicated attacker might be able to do it, but a 6 digit pin with 3 tries is hard to guess. Decapping and convincing a yubikey to reveal the secret key is likely possible, but nontrivial.

To be fair, if you weren't using a token, and were just storing the password protected keyfile on your FDE protected computers, there's nothing to "lose" either.

>* Attacks where the attacker can read files do not turn into a compromise of key material.

Only if the keyfile isn't password protected.

>* Even a compromise that allows code execution would require a sophisticated attacker to pivot: You'd need to figure out how to make good use of the acces gained either in a fully automated fashion or be online when the victim has its token plugged in. You cannot collect the key and later figure out what to do. This pretty much rules out attacks such as the one we're discussing here.

Keyfiles are already harder to monetize than other information you can steal off a computer. There's no market for id_rsa/.asc files, but there are for credit card numbers, personal info, bank/email logins. You have to put in the legwork to make money off them (eg. logging into each server and checking what's on it or whether they can be used to pivot elsewhere, seeing who your contacts are to see whether they can be duped using a signed email, or checking whether you're a maintainer for a software project and using your key to sign a malicious update. Therefore, it's safe to assume that attackers interested in your key files are also sophisticated enough to perform the pivot.

You still need to regard the key as compromised - it's no longer under your control and you have no idea what a potential attacker would try. Most FDE does not lock the disk when the computer goes to sleep, so the attacker can now try to break in via Firewire, ...

While with a physical token, as long as the token is in your possession, the key is entirely under your control (unless you have a backup on your computer, which kind of goes against the idea)

> Therefore, it's safe to assume that attackers interested in your key files are also sophisticated enough to perform the pivot.

Like they strictly did not even attempt in that case? This seems to be targeting python developers. Now, with a python developers ssh keyfile and gpg keyfile (if I manage to unlock it), I could do quite a bit of damage For example try it on github. It's trivial to associate an ssh key with a github acct - the info is public.

Fair point, but this is a very untypical threat model. Basically it protects you against targeted physical attacks. Targetted, because your average laptop thief isn't going to be pulling off DMA attacks. I certainly have not heard of it occurring (targeted or untargeted) in the wild.

>This seems to be targeting python developers. Now, with a python developers ssh keyfile and gpg keyfile (if I manage to unlock it),

There lies the problem. If you used a reasonably secure password (ideally from a password manager), your keys would be as secure as they would be stored on a token. This wasn't an attack that only tokens could mitigate. A free password manager would do just as well.

as mentioned by a sibling comment this can be worked around by social engineering. some ideas:

* simulating software/hardware/connection error, forcing the victim to retry. bonus points if you only start doing it after the victim installs an update to gpg

* in cases where you know the signature doesn't have to be valid, substitute a legitimate signing request with your payload, and returning a fake signature for the legitimate request. for instance, the you coax the victim into sending a signed gpg email. you know that nobody would be checking the signature except for you, so you detect that case and use that opportunity to sign your payload, and return a fake signature to the email program.

* my favorite: causing gpg to fail (thereby forcing the victim to retry) by injecting typos into his terminal when he's invoking gpg from the terminal

Yubikeys are silly and designed to sell rather than solve a problem effectively, IMO.

That model doesn't work. Code affects too much of our life and is used in too many scenarios for a binary "trusted" boolean to be feasible for most people.

Offices and houses have locks inside of them as well as outside. If I invite someone into my office, they don't immediately have the key to my server room. But (while I agree that software bloat is a problem) you'll still find plenty of people after these issues who argue that having too many packages is the real security issue, and really all this comes down to is vetting our repositories better, or forcing everything to be signed, or whatever.

In reality, the long-term solution is that we have to start taking native sandboxing seriously -- embracing efforts like Wayland, Flatpak, SE Linux, JS Realms, and turning on secure sandboxing systems by default. The problem isn't NPM or PyPi, it's Node/Python sandboxing. The problem isn't allowing arbitrary browser extensions, it's per-domain extension sandboxing. The problem isn't third-party scripts, it's browser fingerprinting.

It is impossible to scale a trustworthy repository to the size of NPM, or PyPi, or the Apple store, or AUR, or the Chrome web store. There is not, and is never going to be, a trustworthy repository of that scale.

In the meantime, because most platforms don't have serious sandboxing controls turned on by default, you just have to reduce your dependencies and install less software. But that band-aide fix will get less and less useful over time, because more and more of your life will depend on software from more and more diverse sources, and it will be impossible for you to vet everything. Being conservative about dependencies and code you run is an extremely temporary fix that is not going to work in the future. But people treat it like it's the obvious solution and that we don't have any need to address the fact that most consumer-grade OSes, platforms, and runtimes are simply crap at security.

There are so many distros with little differentiation - I'd think something like this would be quite unique (unless it already exists, and I don't know it!)

Would Python permissions even be enough though? All it takes is one legitimate Python application wanting your Photos (lets say some Python photo manager app you wrote) and now all Python libraries get access.

Unfortunately, I think Apple's direction may be correct. It feels hugely inconvenient, but an end goal of all processes being signed and explicitly allowed certain things seems useful.

At the very least, Python should perhaps never get access to anything beyond the devving folder. Then any real use of Python applications would have to be properly baked out into processes where the OS can manage permissions for. This goes for all languages, Python was just an example here.

This is all off the top of my head, so I could be way off base. But it seems logical to me in the moment.

Apple is operating a racket. There's e.g. no need for signing (and developers buying expensive certificates), you could also have a dedicated "permissions agent" checking executable hashes against an online service, and giving them as many permissions as desired... So users could (1) pick and choose their "permissions providers" (not necessarily Apple, could also be e.g. GNUpermissions or WikiPermissions or whatever), (2) users could modify permissions (e.g. provider defaults to Web Access but I want to deny it for this specific executable), and (3) all (even unsigned) programs could run, but with minimal permissions by default (i.e. sandboxed).

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/364/allow-setuid-on...

Playing devil's advocate... I'm sure most folks here appreciate that providing granular level of permissions/restrictions can often lead to a less secure environment!

Users (of pretty much every skill level) quickly become overwhelmed and give up.

I recall advocating that a large client group manage their own permissions in Sharepoint. It was a painful and futile exercise! Though really not much different than IT admins trying to managing security of a large organization using active directory.

All I want is for an application to be subject to policies just like other users are. Is that so hard? And honestly, to provide all this tooling for being careful who you share files with, while providing none of that to being careful about which applications I share data with, is a little bit disingenuous about the relationship between people and applications. People write and operate applications, so when I am sharing my data with applications, I am sharing it with people too. I just don't get to find out who or have any specific control over that.

The usual interfaces for manipulating ACLs are not very friendly so you'd want to have some kind of tool to set this thing up. Managing the ACLs, and managing the program grouping UIDs, and making it so things don't get regularly broken by package managers that don't know about this system is probably going to be challenging.

What I'd like to see is someone make an access control system for Unix based off of the ideas from the old DEC PDP-10 operating system TOPS-10 file daemon system. TOPS-10 originally just had owner/group based access. Later, they added the file daemon access control system. The way that worked is simple:

1. If an access was allowed by the owner/group system, it went through normally.

2. If an access was NOT allowed by the owner/group system, and the new "use file daemon" flag had not been set by the caller, the accesses was denied.

3. If, on the other hand, the "use file daemon" flag was set, the OS sent a message to the file daemon describing the desired access, and asking the file daemon if it should be allowed or not. Whether the OS allowed the access or not was determined by the file daemon.

In what follows I'm probably getting some details wrong, but the general idea is right.

The way file daemon made its decision was by consulting a rules file containing access rules. The rules file was named ACCESS.USR. I don't remember if file daemon looked for that in the same directory as the file it was being asked about, in the home directory of the owner of the file, or what.

The key idea is that the access rules for a file were in ACCESS.USR, NOT in metadata of the file itself. ACCESS.USR allowed for wildcards, so one rule in there could specify the access rights for a whole class of files--including files that did not yet exist.

My recollection is that the rule matching could be based on the name of the file someone is trying to access (full or partial, with wildcards), the user and group that is trying for access (I believe wildcards were allowed here, too), and what program was being used.

So let's say you wrote a game, and it wanted to keep a high score file. You could make an entry in ACCESS.USR that said anyone was allowed write access to SCORES.TXT if they were running EMPIRE.EXE. (Picking EMPIRE for my example in the hopes of summoning Walter Bright, since he probably remembers more details than I do about file daemon). Then just make sure to set the permissions on SCORES.TXT so that access by anyone other than yourself will fail, and make sure that EMPIRE.EXE sets the "use file daemon" flag when it tries to write the score file.

This fits in well with the way users think about things. For example, let's say I've got public and private key files. My public key files have .PUB extensions and my private key files have .KEY extensions. It is easy to put a rule in ACCESS.USR that denies all others access to my .KEY files. If I do something that creates a new .KEY file, I don't have to make sure whatever tool created it set the ACLs...I just have to make sure I use a .KEY extension.

It's a lot easier to develop and maintain a naming convention that reflects my security requirements and stick to that than it is to manage per file ACLs that reflect my requirements.

Sadly "modern security awareness" doesn't seem to really amount to anything, and existing solutions go unused. %90 of this "malware library" problem too would have been avoided if package repositories just required all packages to be signed with keys on hardware dongles. Ruby and python and some others at least have the excuse of inertia, but it's pretty cynical of everything else to not require signing already, when the added friction is nothing relative to the effort of writing software worth publishing.

I'm with you about requiring signatures, and you can get around the FUD about packages getting abandoned because of developers losing keys by implementing something like TUF[1] (because of delegations in the targets role), but I don't really see how you can enforce dongle usage. That is, how can the repository administrators tell the difference between a signature from a key on a hardware dongle and a signature from a key on somebody's windows laptop? You'd need an IRL auditing process, which just isn't feasible for most open source packages.

[1] https://theupdateframework.github.io/

A) it adds cost to what was previously free for many people

B) it does nothing to deter bad actors

C) many software packages would be abandoned because their dongle was lost or destroyed

Android Q has 'scoped storage access' to prevent this and individual folder access permission; but is optional and will be enforced only in the next major android version which by android update standards will take another 5-6 years to get widely adopted.

It is horrible for any reasonable professional workflow. Even if you get permissions lined up correctly once, when you change your workflow, shit breaks. and more subtly, the way permissions accrete through reactive interactive dialogs, folks become less secure over time - past permission "paths" enable capabilities that the user no longer even remembers making.

More formal ways of defining security policy of course work better (I deal with that sort of thing for a living), but expecting normal people to be able to understand how to, e.g., use `restorecon` or the moral equivalent is a nonstarter.

Personally, I'm headed back to Linux when I need to replace the Macbook I'm typing on. I'm no longer the target MacOS user, and I'm not going to rely on a machine I don't control.

It was also my first thought after I recently upgraded MacOS, and was bombarded with multiple permission dialogs whenever I did anything.

I still think something like it could evolve to fill that role.

But I do have to say, the more Canonical and Redhat attempt to "innovate", the more I appreciate FreeBSD.

Every time you walk on the street you have to trust 1000s of strangers they are not going to murder you or rob you. You also know you should not go into dark alleys alone at night.

This is just how life works.

1. Ban libraries that have names that might confused with others (so no I where L is etc).

2. Only use libraries that have been around for over 1 year (you're relying on the community to debug them).

I think with these two alone you might get rid of most issues. The problem is that someone might buy an old, trusted name and then inject malicious code. I don't know of a technical way to enforce change of ownership that might be useful and not too much work. Alternatively a nefarious player might release useful code, bide their time to get a reputation, and then inject malicious code.

Short Life VMs are a good idea but sometimes you want them all to talk to each other.

Large repos like Github should do an automated similarity search and prominently display potential older (as in creation date) versions of the same library even if they are not forked from the original repo directly.

I agree that this is some obvious low-lying fruit here. Given that the onus is currently on devs here, an actionable solution today is to use a font which makes the differences between i, I, L, 1 easily distinguishable (obviously not fool-proof), or bake a check for malevolently named dependencies into your linter or plugin.

Look to browsers, imo. 'Extensions', which are very analogous to packages, have to package a manifest, users must explicitly ack the permissions, and they have restricted access to the system.

The result has been a very hands-off approach. Package management systems for user-land libraries, like pip and so on, are extra guilty of being hands-off. And who wants their dev tools telling them what they can and can't do?

It should not, instead, require root privileges to add that to your system. Or, we should be providing virtualization like containers so that it can do 'root-y things' safely.

This means you have to obsessively specify dependencies, including exactly which files to fetch from the internet and which system components are required. And it also means some lovely security wins. For instance, if everyone lost their minds and decided that we should wrap all of our Python packages with BuildStream metadata and build everything that way, a build-time attack would be extremely difficult :)

Of course, said library could do whatever evil it wishes for end users, but I guess the interesting lesson here is that the steps required for sandboxing can have genuine benefits outside of security, as well.

That mostly works for whole applications. I'm not sure how to apply it to libraries for developers though. Especially ones that would get installed in userspace, like these python packages.

We have attackers who:

a) Want to run code on package installation

b) Want to run code on application execution

Restricting packages on installation helps with (a)

I disagree that developers are not attractive targets. If I were to target a typical tech company I would absolutely go for a developer. I'd wait for them to SSH to production, hijack their connection, and start moving around. That's a hell of a lot better than if I attack HR and have to start moving laterally in a corporate environment to escalate.

As for backdooring production services or applications, ala (b), it's a more complex and bespoke problem to solve I think. I think package managers themselves are not suited to solve this problem and it is up to the OS to restrict programs more by default, like mobile OS's/ Browsers do.

Even imagining how is kind of tough. How do you let some Python scripts, but not others, access certain directories, like the ones with your SSH keys? It would have to be built into Python, which may mean major changes to tons of packages. Ditto Ruby, NodeJS, Perl, PHP, and every other interpreted language out there. And how do you develop compiled applications in such an env? Suppose every new build would have to be signed with the expected permissions. But how would you let one internal package access a dir, but not some other one? More internal permission systems I guess?

Why isn't the file system an object you pass around instead?

It's a long, kinda story, which I'm not intimately familiar with, but seems to boil down to, it's more effort than we're willing to spend on rebooting our entire computing infrastructure. (Lots of things that could improve computing have that problem. "Rebooting our entire computing infrastructure" is a boil-the-ocean problem now.)

In an object oriented setting, it's simply a matter of not exposing the filesystem (etc.) as globals, but instead as an object that is passed around explicitly, starting from main(). There are a few upcoming languages that do this.

In a true top-to-bottom capabilities based system, that would not be true. You could hand out access to a shell along with a certain set of capabilities and be much less concerned about what will happen in that shell. Hypothetically, implemented correctly, with CPU & RAM-based capabilities, you could safely hand out shell access to random people on the internet and be sure they won't do anything wrong. That is not the case today, if you just have your own little VM world.

If you try to extend your VM, you find yourself re-implementing more and more of the world. Creating even a simple GUI, for instance, is a huuuuuge undertaking for a very small group of interested people. The baseline of expected functionality in a new language environment is going up every year. It's hard to get over the initial hump.

On the flip side, if you do it from the OS level, and you truly implement this new model and don't have a generic "give up and just go back to UNIX/Windows/etc" callout, you have the problem that while you have an OS, you can't do anything in it, no matter how much better it may theoretically be. You can't get anyone to work in it, because there's no value there. See Plan 9 for an example of how this goes down.

Getting something like a capabilities-based OS going is basically "rebooting the computing world" because it's not just a matter of getting "an OS", it's a matter of getting an OS, a windowing environment with some usable GUI, a browser capable of browsing the "real" web and not just some 1995-esque subset, some kind of terminal, a whackload of libraries for programmers to use, a whole bunch of apps I'm not even thinking of here, and more before anyone will even give you the time of day in the real world, and without making it out to the "real world" all your security is pointless. It's very difficult to create a business plan where that makes any sort of sense; no matter how glorious the payoff may be in 20-30 years, simple time-based discounting of value makes it very difficult to be rational to commit the vast amounts of effort it would take today to start getting there. Those research projects are great, and I value them, and wouldn't ask them to stop, but they are far, far less than 1% of what would be required to make them truly useful. Nobody has crossed that point in the last 20 years, even without trying to bring a novel security mechanism to everybody. The closest thing to a new OS we've gotten are the mobile OSes which are still fundamentally just competently-managed UNIX systems under the hood. What capabilities appear to be there are still just bashed on top of the UNIX permissions model, not the true, granular capabilities of those research projects.

I have a guest WiFi partly for that reason so when guest come over their apps hopefully can't hack stuff on my non-guest network. Unfortunately every new game/app/dep I install on my phone/pc/mac/tv/appletv/ps4/switch can still do that and while I might trust the app devs I don't trust the library devs, especially the analytics libs compiled into every game.

Yarn, a ja package manager, tried to forbid any code execution during installs. That may be a good idea. At least show a warning or require an extra flag before executing anything.

Does anyone know similar solution for today's win10, Linux, Android environment?

Win10's firewall is ok for blocking when configure manually. But it lacks the "alert" functionalities on any new app/connections requests.

The lightweight sandbox VMs seem to be pretty useful so far. It's still so new that I've not seen it used outside of blog posts yet, but that's the nature of cutting edge features only "just" released. (It was released with 1903 in May, which was delayed several months and a lot of businesses still are hesitant to install it.)

Windows 10 has had Controlled Folder Access (aka Ransomware Protection) available as an option for a while as well, which acts like Apple's system of forcing apps to need additional permissions to user directories. It's not quite as fine-grained as Apple's yet, and it is certainly not on by default.

(I turned it on for interesting paranoia reasons on my gaming desktop, and it's been fascinating to watch what gets blocked. Though my paranoia led me to adding Steam folders to the Controlled Folders list, which has especially made it a permissions whack-a-mole because Game Developers are children and games access random folders all the time, use five EXEs where one probably should have been enough, use random EXEs in TEMP folders to call EXEs in Steam folders, games not installed by Steam sometimes try to access Steam folders, NVidia wants to touch everything, etc.)

> Both MS and Apple offer their App stores with more locked down experiences though I'm sad they conflate app security and app markets.

Windows 10 has had sideloading on by default for years now, and supports Win32 apps inside APPX/MSIX. Win32 apps by default aren't nearly as sandboxed sadly (because it is hard to guarantee Win32 apps work as expected when sandboxed), but some sandboxing is better than none. The biggest issue seems a lot less to do with "app market" (you don't have to publish to the Microsoft Store, and MSIX even supports auto-updating for sideloaded apps vaguely "ClickOnce-style") and a lot more to do with "please rebuild your installer to something more modern", which is a hurdle a lot of developers don't want to overcome. (Because installers are terrible and once one is built who wants to rebuild it. Because MSIX support for Windows 7 is still "Beta" with the April end-of-support for Windows 7 looming over everything, and some Enterprises clutching their Windows 7 purses as the new XP...) Who wants extra app security when it means a lot of development effort to repackage your app? (Even if it can be semi-automated from your existing installer.)

Fortunately there's some amazing work on supporting library isolation in WASM. There was a really good blog post about it recently.

Meanwhile, in a less than perfect world there's XFENCE [0], previously known as LittleFlocker. It's basically LittleSnitch for files. It was originally developed by Jonathan Zdziarski and later sold to F-Secure.

The challenge is to set it up in such a way that the level of interaction is kept at a minimum while still providing some level of protection.

I might write a detailed blog post / howto about it, but meanwhile here's the TL;DR if someone wants to try this blacklist/greylist approach:

1. Set an 'Allow any app – rwc' rule for /Users to override the default 'Watch – rw' rule there, which would otherwise result in a ton of popups. This does not override the more specific watch rules for some critical resources like loginitems, etc.

2. Add watch rules for additional critical resources, like ~/.gnupg, ~/.ssh, ~/bin, possible password manager directories, Firefox/Chrome directories to prevent cookie extraction, etc.

3. Temporarily add a watch rwc rule for ~/, thus overriding the Allow rule for /Users.

4. Run any network connected software with a potentially large attack surface like browsers, torrent clients, vpn clients, etc. and give them the required permissions to your home directory using the popups. Make sure to put them through their paces in terms of file system access to cover all possible use cases.

5. When they are usable without any more popups, remove the temporary watch rule and add 'Deny rwc to /Users' rules for each one, thus overriding the general /Allow rule we created above. An application-specific watch rule would be nice here instead, but sadly that doesn't seem to be possible – watch rules apply to all applications.

Execute steps 3–5 for any other untrusted software you might want to install/run.

When combined with LittleSnitch to catch possible attempts at data extraction, this reduces the risk of rogue applications extracting/damaging critical data and limits the potential damage of possible RCE vulnerabilities in network connected software. And it does this with a minimum of interaction – after the initial setup phase.

I've been running LittleFlocker/XFENCE for a couple of years now and the setup described above for maybe a year and it works like a charm, currently on Mojave, previously High Sierra, all the way back to Capitan, if memory serves.

A whitelist approach would of course be more secure, but that's way too stressful and distracting for me.

[0] https://community.f-secure.com/t5/Home-Security/XFENCE-beta-...

Software repositories without a human review process are a bloody stupid idea.

What review process? Do people actually review/audit the code? Usually they don't. All it tells you that at least one person though it looked "okay enough" to package it, based on unclear criteria. It's most certainly not a "review process".

I can't remember ever having seen anything like this in Debian, for instance.

This wasn't just for Python libraries, but also with OS packages (especially non-sanctioned RPMs). I've been very selective about what I install globally, and usually first reach for a VM or other virtual environment.

One big counter to this is when I want to make it a simple commandline tool to run. I have to enter a Virtualenv just to run my fancier `ls` command?

    apk add -t .myproject-deps py3-foobar py3-foobaz

Reminds me of the fraudulent scientific papers that get caught using really dumb fakes (e.g., microscopy pictures that are copies of one another re-zoomed and rotated); we catch the dumb ones, but presumably not all malicious actors are dumb, so there must be a lot more fraudulent work out there.

For that matter, isn't there a reasonable systematic way to catch out typosquatters simply based on text analysis? Any library name that's a short edit distance from a popular library should have been carefully reviewed from the start; there's no excuse for "jeilyfish" to have lasted more than a couple of days.

You could probably write one using Python & jellyfish.

Huh! Hadn’t realized. That adds an ironic spin to the whole thing.

And the problem is much larger than these typosquatting attacks. Abandoned Github projects taken over my malicious users, rogue Maven/npm/PyPI/what have you repositories, hacked accounts on any website that is used for distributing programs, feature branches in open source projecs that are automatically built on CI servers in side corporate networks, the possibilities to grab data and send it to somewhere on the internet are endless.

One security measure that somehow grew out of fashion over the last years, is at least on application servers, to disallow any outgoing network traffic, especially to the internet (at least any cloud environment I see nowadays allows it by default). This would largely prevent these sorts of attacks from being able to actually send anything out, but also prevent XXE attacks from happening, prevent reverse connections to an attacker host from being set up, make SSRF attacks harder to verify, and so on.

I strongly recommend whitelisting only the network traffic that your application actually needs.

I'm interested in this approach

I'm deliberately avoiding the term "connection" above because new UDP-first protocols require slightly different handling to determine who initiated what, but most routing/firewall software can deny-initiated-outbound for those protocols as well.

* python3-dateutil has 271 downloads from non-mirrors in last month[1]

* jeilifish has only 106 downloads from non-mirrors in last month[2]

[1]:https://pypistats.org/packages/python3-dateutil

[2]: https://pypistats.org/packages/jeilyfish

That solution also has the benefit of allowing you to call a package from any language from your language of choice.

I highly recommnend reading their the article introducing the idea, its very convincing:

[0] https://bytecodealliance.org/articles/announcing-the-bytecod...

There are a few other such systems that look interesting; Agoric is working on one for JavaScript, Google has a kernel patch set that adds capability support to Linux, and Christopher Lemmer Webber is working on a similar system on top of Racket called Spritely Goblins. I’m excited about all of them though, because it feels like this kind of security model is starting to gain public awareness!

Java, has started going down this route with the new module system and Lookup objects, however, this is mainly for restricted field/method/constructor access. I do hope we will see something similar for File and Network I/O (Random memory access is less of an issue in Java)

I do think we are going to see a lot more of this in the future.

That said, the Bytecode Alliance stuff appears to be multi-language, so that's neat! I could see that making WASM runtimes pretty useful even outside the web.

Some environments (Python, Node) are more susceptible to this sort of trickery than others.

There is a bunch of stuff PyPi could do short of full curation that would make this much harder.

A better solution is for languages to provide a kind of "module sandboxing" where modules need to declare the capabilities they need, and the runtime prevents them from accessing anything else.

In this case, the module would have needed to request the ability to make an outgoing TCP/IP connection - and that request should raise red flags for a date parsing utility.

Eg, declare parts of the compiled/interpreted code with specific privileges. Kind of like how memory regions can be NX.

Sandboxing libraries specifically seems like a fools errand.

I don't know exactly how it would work. Maybe modules that request these permissions get extra scrutiny, or users can specify "levels" that different modules can run at. If you specify MyPy to run at the least-priv level, it will fail to install/load if it requests greater capabilities.

I can't really think of any other way around the problem. It is a problem for all other scripting languages, especially nodeJS.

Since such info is available from PyPI API, I wrote my own "pypisearch" script to sort by latest release date and include number of releases to weed out packages that seem useful but are old or rarely released. I should probably integrate PGP signing info too into it.

EDIT: another vector I saw mentioned in another comment: you pull in what appears to be a 'valid' dependency, and jeIlyfish is listed as a dependency of that package; looks legit so you proceed.

I think an experienced programmer probably would be less likely to do this, but perhaps a junior programmer working on a system that no one wants to support anymore introduces a "bad" module.

Downloads last day: 13 Downloads last week: 103 Downloads last month: 119

Check https://pypistats.org/packages/jeilyfish you won't believe your own eyes.

* jeilifish has only 106 downloads from non-mirrors in last month[2]

[1]:https://pypistats.org/packages/python3-dateutil

[2]: https://pypistats.org/packages/jeilyfish

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21702973

https://libraries.io/pypi/jeIlyfish

https://libraries.io/pypi/python3-dateutil

Traditional Unix file permissions are pretty much a joke for the way developer computers get used (one user - does everything). Real process sandboxing is needed.

    $ pkgman install hip2019pretty-ls
    $ su sandboxeduser prettyls

But how does jellyfish with a different char for L work? Someone would need to copy and paste it. But if they go to pypi, it won't have many installs.

Unless they started writing tutorials with:

"okay now just pip install X"

Then dateutil calls the code in jeilyfish.

And god help us if a malicious install command was posted, even if only for a few minutes before being edited, to a help or forum site like StackOverflow or Reddit.

If people are using number of installs as a safety metric, can't blackhats game that by having a bot install the package many times?

You don’t need to copy and paste it, or go to pypi, since there are commonly used ways to install packages by clicking on the name.

Gitlab is of course free to disclose any information they like about those abusing their platform.