FYI: Lemmy.world and other instances were hacked. Beehaw.org took itself down to mitigate risks - eviltoast

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.

  • philm@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    It’s just a sliiiight bit more extreme than a small difference.

    Like you’re on the other side of the spectrum (i.e. Nazi)?

    Doesn’t help. They’re still potentially malicious actors.

    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…

    • bioemerl@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Like you’re on the other side of the spectrum (i.e. Nazi)?

      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.

      I trust these guys a lot more than most politicians or big companies

      Cheap ass copout reasoning there. You’re still trusting code you shouldn’t.

      • philm@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        You’re still trusting code you shouldn’t.

        In case you haven’t understood my previous argument. I trust code I can actually read and reason about (compared to e.g. reddit, facebook etc.). And just to prove my point, I am already looking over the codebase of lemmy, because there are obviously a lot of things that can still be improved, but malicious intent I haven’t found yet. And if I have missed something, other people will certainly find such things, and if that’s the case (which I don’t believe) then shit will certainly hit the fan.

        kbin is also open source, and I’m happy that there are other projects with a similar vision as lemmy (the choice for PHP is an absolute mystery for me, but whatever floats your boat I guess). More (non-malicious) implementations always improve the fediverse in many ways.

        • bioemerl@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          I trust code I can actually read and reason about

          Unless you’re auditing the code yourself you can’t. This is my point. The fact something is open source does not and will never protect you unless you go out of your way to do the herculean task of auditing it yourself.

          And even if you audited it, guess what happens next week? Next year? The bigger the system gets the more valuable it is a target. I don’t expect anything malicious to happen now. I expect it to happen once the growth phase is over.

          At the end of the day it all falls down to trust.

          • philm@programming.dev
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            1 year ago

            Sorry, but I start to believe that you’re not actually a(n experienced) software engineer with open source experience. The codebase isn’t that big and complex, though admittedly it’s big enough that I haven’t checked every detail yet, but again, I’m by far not the only person that watches, reads, reasons and audits the code, and that’s what makes open source so secure. Btw. I can absolutely reason about code I’m reading, I’m not exactly sure what you mean with auditing, but for me that is reading and understanding what the code does…

            The bigger the system gets the more valuable it is a target

            Well the bigger an open source project gets, the more contributors (not always, but definitely in this case) have insight into the codebase and more likely see malicious intent. So in that regard: it will get safer over time.

            • bioemerl@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              So in that regard: it will get safer over time.

              That’s true, but it’ll never be “safe” thanks to the malicious actors controlling pull request and being easily able to bypass most eyeballs with minor or major changes.

              • philm@programming.dev
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                1 year ago

                The world will never be safe… (increasingly accelerated by climate change). The point that the devs are malicious actors still has to be proven, and I don’t see any evidence yet. They have their own instance that they control and censor/moderate (and openly so btw.), I’m totally fine with that, but the open source project certainly doesn’t have the intent to be malicious (well to some regard in taking reddits userbase ^^).

                Anyway I’m not continuing feeding the troll, have a nice day and please don’t fall to conspiracy theories (believing that the lemmy devs are malicious actors is probably the first step in that direction…)

                • bioemerl@kbin.social
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                  1 year ago

                  The world will never be safe… (increasingly accelerated by climate change)

                  Alright, with this wild tangent I’m done here.

                  • philm@programming.dev
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                    1 year ago

                    Ahh I just hit a wound. Just checked your history, of course how could I not see it, a climate-change denier as well, had to be… Well so you’re probably already lost then…