this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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Canonical is enacting manual reviews for all newly registered uploads to its Snap Store following what it describes as a ‘potential security incident’.

In this instance it appears that folks have uploaded apps purporting to be official apps/tools for crypto ledger tool Ledger and these apps were able to get folks backups codes (which people enter thinking it’s legit) and …the bad actors can use that to extract funds.

Based on what Canonical has said so far – and the actions they’ve taken – it doesn’t seem like these malicious snaps were exploiting security holes within snaps, snapd, or the Snap Store infrastructure itself – which is a good thing.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago

FWIW it doesnt seem necessarily to be Snap's fault, but it does prove that there's a risk for Canonical as they move to cut out Flatpak and Debs from their software offering people are going to take advantage of the fact that a bunch of legitimate apps that arent interested in snap are going to be impersonated incredibly easy because of their choice to restrict access to other sources.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Oh no, how could this have happened, packaging apps with extra complexity making it harder to verify they're legitimate, nobody could have possibly seen this one coming...

🙄

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

More of a centralization/impersonation issue, no? After all, verifying a SHA sum is only helpful if you know the SHA sum of the trustworthy version of a package.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I doubt they even did that, how would they compare it? They probably just dumbly trusted the name.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Flatpak has extra complexity but its approach is to distrust apps, hence it is more secure than a traditional package. The problem here is that snap's approach is to trust canonical.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

and EVERY ONE of flatpak packages are verified before being added to the store, doubt that canonical do that

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Canonical does check each package. Now they even check each upload manually. Flathub doesn't check much once an app is on the store.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Until there's an option to turn off auto-update (without killing the daemon), snap can go to hell.

Ive lost so much time with snap updating Firefox and breaking my current session of multiple private windows/tabs. (Yes, I know you can use the .deb version but I shouldn't have to go through those extra steps)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Just spin up an in-house Snap Store Proxy. Distributed by snap, of course.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is there even Firefox deb for Ubuntu now?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes. But you have to add Firefox's PPA.

I just use Mint which had regular Firefox in their repo.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They killed that too on ubuntu iirc

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Did they? Oh f! That is plain nasty Ubuntu. Sounds alot like lock-in....

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, I remember they kill the deb in the end.. That's why I move using tar.gz, and move away from Ubuntu to fedora... rpms still better and usefull when we need rollback :v

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago