Canonical's Snap Store Hit By Malicious Apps
Canonical's Snap Store Hit By Malicious Apps
Hopefully both of the people using snaps can recover from this.
Sadly that is not true, see snap vs flatpak usage in debian.
Keep criticizing snap (But do it in a way that is trustworthy and valuable), if somebody wants to use snap due to some advantage that is fine but he should make an informed decision
Good thing I can just install applications from
aptinstead...user@pc:~$: sudo apt install app The following additional packages will be installed: snapd....oh.
Canonical's changes to apt could be considered malicious in and of themselves because it installs from a source you didn't request for, sure seems malicious to me.
Agreed. Switching out .deb packages in the package manager for snap stubs was a bridge too far, and I went back to Debian.
This is the major reason why maintainers matter. Any method of software distribution that removes the maintainer is absolutely guaranteed to have malware. (Or if you don't consider 99% software on Google Play Store the App Store to be "malware", it's at the very least hostile to and exploitative of users). We need package maintainers.
The root of the problem i think is that the store is closed source, i don't think you will find a lot of people willing to work for a closed source store for some for profit company.
As much as I despise snap, this instance bring some questions into how other popular cross-linux platform app stores like flathub and nix-channels/packages provide guardrails against malwares.
I’m aware flathub has a “verified” checks for packages from the same maintainers/developers, but I’m unsure about nix-channels. Even then, flathub packages are not reviewed by anyone, are they?
Nixpkgs submissions work through GitHub PRs which have to be reviewed, and packages usually build from source (or download binaries from the official site if no source is available, and verifying it against a checksum). It’s a much safer model since every user has a reproducible script to build the binary, especially if Flathub doesn’t have any reviews as you say.
Same as flatpak, it's quite strict...
Wouldn't it go noticed quickly if a super popular flatpak distribution app is compromised? I love flatpacks for my 5 desktop apps that I actually use everyday, but it is definitely not suitable for general apps I install on a whim.
As a snap package maintainer i find it weird that there weren't any guardrails in place to avoid situations like this, considering that the main snap consumer are Ubuntu users and Ubuntu is from canonical.
I guess I should've set my expectations a bit lower
you confuse canonical with fedora or rhel standard... which... is sad... but at least flatpak is the savior in the end. haha..
Red Had has 20x the employees as Canonical, I hope their product is better
Yeah, my bad 😅
I've forgotten that Canonical is not like Fedora or Red Hat
...but at least flatpak is the savior in the end.
Flatpak definitely has a potential, I use them daily. Haven't had any issues so far
I've been... baffled... that all of Canonical's different products don't work better together.
It's not that they don't work better in conjunction, it's canonical's lack of moderation in the snapcraft store.
This could've avoided day one by adding a manual review process (like what they are temporarily doing right now)
I don't know how flathub handles new package submissions, but I think that they definitely need to have a process similar to what other distros have in place for native packages (heck, even Ubuntu's own repos have a review process)
Wooow Ubuntu didnt expect that huh...
Having a proprietary store ran by a single Company has nothing to do with Linuxes security model
Ah hahaha! Take that Canonical and your stupid snap store!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Stemming from reports of several fake crypto apps appearing in Canonical's Snap Store that aimed to steal user funds, temporary restrictions have been put in place while Canonical investigates the security matter.
A temporary manual review requirement has also been put in place on new Snap registrations.
This manual review is intended to thwart bad actors from registering names of legitimate applications (or at least legitimate sounding names) and using that as an avenue for pushing malicious Snaps to users.
"If you try to register a new snap while the requirement is active, you will be prompted to “request reserved name”.
Upon a successful manual review from the Snap Store staff, the name will be registered.
We want to thoroughly investigate this incident without introducing any noise into the system, and more importantly, we want to make sure our users have a safe and trusted experience with the Snap Store.
The original article contains 240 words, the summary contains 150 words. Saved 38%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
When will we learn? (Drew DeVault, May 2022)
This isn't even the first such incident with snap. https://github.com/canonical/snapcraft.io/issues/651
Fedora > Ubuntu
And from "Ubuntu Software" I don't see a way to report a suspected app.