Obsidian CEO here. There is a major update coming soon for plugin security. I think it will address many of the concerns people have raised in this thread. It's a hard problem but we are working on it.
That said, the headline is misleading. This article is about a social engineering attack that requires the user to actively reject multiple safety warnings in Obsidian. As far as I know this is a proof of concept, I haven't seen any reports of users being affected by this attack.
I've been using obsidian for years as a paying customer. Will continue to pay as price point is good and it just works. However, unless plugin security massively improves I will never install any plugins.
lol we told you plugins were insecure years ago. I distinctly remember getting flamed in your discord because I said that they had full disk access. Too little too late.
The insecurity is part of the benefit. Obsidian being so open, allowing easy customizing is what makes it great. They should add some more bells, whistles and guards to prevent sneaky social attacks, but they can't close Obsidian all together, or it would kill the app.
In 2026, applications, third or even first party, don't need to have full-disk access, and are not given either. They see a jailroot environment. I give full disk access to the terminal app, and a handful of others. 90% of them, nope.
At least that's the case in macOS, I'm pretty sure Windows can do that too. Linux of course has had such capability since forever, but I guess most distros you need to manually take care of it.
Maybe it isn't built-in, but most Windows user I've worked with, including myself, have been using Sandboxie for probably two decades at this point, probably hard to find any Windows software that is more ubiquitous than Sandboxie in developer circles.
This hardening is enabled by default with Gatekeeper. That includes Homebrew apps, unless you disable it.
When an app tries to access something outside of its sandbox, you get a notification asking to approve or deny. Full Disk Access I think needs to be explicitly given on System Settings (Privacy & Security -> Full Disk Access).
Yes you can sandbox Obsidian on the OS. The point they're making is nearly every third party program ships Without sandboxing. There's nothing special about Obsidian here.
I've never tried to do this or similar in Windows (obviously easy in unix-like environments) but I'm going to bet it's far more trouble than it's worth for 99% of users
On macOS at least those 99% of users are probably installing from the App Store, where apps are sandboxed by default and need to explicitly ask for access to paths outside that sandbox. Even when not installed from the App Store a permission dialogue is popped if an application tries to read from sensitive paths like your photo library.
Does that help in this case though? I think the worry is that a rogue Obsidian plugin does bad stuff with your Obsidian vault, not just do stuff to the rest of the computer. But that vault/those notes live in the same sandbox as the (rogue) 3rd party plugin, which doesn't help with that, they really need to be isolated away from the notes themselves.
Lol it's a social engineering attack. What are you talking about. Don't run programs you don't trust, especially when being asked to do so by strangers on the line.
I don't know how hard it would be but IMHO adding some kind of permissions dialog(?) akin to Android would go a long way. 99% of Obsidian plugins don't need full disk access, or internet access for that matter.
That'd require some sort of sandbox, which they already seem to not want to have, for whatever reason. If you don't want that, and you want to use JS, building any sort of permission system on top of that that you cannot easily work around, gets really tricky if not impossible.
This is pearl clutching. This feels like a massive overreaction. If you don't want to use it because it's not open source, that's fine, but you're spreading a lot of snarky FUD about the creators.
They are not making excuses, they stated clearly why open sourcing it is tangential to this problem at best, and they're not the only user to call out the hijacking of the thread. They have been quite clear about why they keep it closed source, so I don't know why you're making it sound like they are lying to their users.
Your rant about audits has little to do with the article too. Telling everyone we're going to get rug pulled is exactly the kind of performative FUD that is meant to get a reaction more than anything.
Speaking for myself, I'm going to keep using it, because nothing has come close to the convenience and performance. Would love an open source alternative to prove me wrong, but I haven't seen it.
That's your opinion. I respect your choices and your opinions. I speak for myself. This is the first time I've seen this company's CEO post somewhere. I really couldn't trust this software less.
To be fair, when someone comes up with excuses for not making something open source, it comes off as dishonest. Be honest. Say that you want to keep it closed to keep control and make money. There's no need to say otherwise. I do the same. I keep code private to make money. I don't say more than that.
You'll see a plethora of such apps made with LLMs. People will write something custom to meet their own needs and to have the features they need.
If you look at my GitHub profile[1] you'll see that the majority of my time is spent on open source. But my priority is open sourcing the tools and libraries I would want if I were building an alternative to Obsidian (Defuddle, JSON Canvas, Web Clipper, Importer, Flexoki, etc) because I believe all software is ephemeral and that files matter more than apps[2].
Obsidian is a free app made by seven people. If we were purely financially-motivated there are many levers we could have pulled, e.g. adding feature gates, not allowing alternatives to our paid services into the official directory, etc. But as I wrote in the tweet linked above, I have spent decades making open source projects and those have never paid the bills. So yes, there is some financial motivation behind that decision.
I've read your twitter post. That makes sense. I've read a blog post or some kind forum thread in which it was said that the maintenance of Obsidian as an open source project would be an issue and some other similar statements. This was a while ago.
Some are OK with the use of a closed source note taking app. Perhaps an enterprise version with a different feature set might be useful to companies.
For notes written on my own computer, I use open source software to write and handle the sync myself.
> when someone comes up with excuses for not making something open source
This is a wild take even coming from HN. Nobody needs an excuse to not make something open source.
This sort of entitlement does, and has done, far more damage to the OSS movement than anyone's "excuses" for not open sourcing their code. Full stop.
You can absolutely prefer open source software and choose not to trust closed-source apps. That’s all fair. But treating closed source itself as evidence of deception or impending betrayal is exactly the kind of ideological purity test that makes these conversations exhausting.
You've got it backwards. It's the fact that long arguments were written against making it open source that have determined me to make that statement. You don't have to provide an argument for not making it open source. It's the fact that arguments were made against making it open source or at least source available.
The business model is obvious. Sell the sync service.
"Oh, please, say you want to keep it closed source because you're afraid you'll lose money and control."
That's not good enough for open source zealots. That's when you end up being the headliner in an endless flood of blog posts and detailing comments telling everyone you're a 'proprietary evil man'.
It's open source or nothing. And how dare you make money.
LMAO. That won't happen in a million years. They are bending over backwards not to give proper file access on iOS so they can sell subscriptions. Do you think they would do such a crazy thing? I bet you my life savings it won't happen.
They are being roasted in the comments because they give file access to the plugins, now they are bad because they don't give file access. There is no winning lmao
Is this like a popup? which most people actively accept without blinking
I think plugin/extensions should be a bit harder to run by default. I get the user friction from extra hurdles before using their plugins etc., but I don't think there is an actually safe way to execute arbitrary code, unaudited, without sandboxing, or other restrictions.
The pop-ups and "social engineering" in question are things that any users in HN likely already accepted, which is to enable community plugins.
These community plugins are the backbone of Obsidian and where a lot of the meat is behind its fame come from.
There's no protections beyond that, community plugins can do whatever they want. Thankfully, the vast majority of them are open-source.
As someone who doesn't use shared vaults - would the warning popup, 'to enable the "Installed community plugins" synchronization feature', not be on a per shared vault basis? Is trusting a single shared vault for plugin sync going to mean I sync my plugins for every shared vault?
IMO that's an issue in and of itself, but it doesn't read that way in the (very unclear) original article.
Get real, kepano. You’re overestimating the consciousness of most casual users. Having godmode, RCE-capable plug-ins behind few safety warnings that most people will happily ignore to get shit done is not good engineering. I understand the constraints. In your shoes I would at minimum make a different version of the app in which you could allow these plug-ins and not put them under trivial banners within the canonical version of the app. You say you have banners, but these sit in the natural flow of the user journey, the options are clearly available and these banners are merely to exempt you from any liability, not to protect the users.
Chrome gutted extension capabilities for safety and now it is so useless, politically unwanted extensions have "lite" versions and every big project and their dog ship their own chromium browser.
I use Obsidian because it does not treat me like a child. They can add more nags and banners for normies, but the capabilities should remain.
I have to agree. You can keep pulling that logic back another step (and that seems to have been happening for many steps now) to the point that you no longer have the ability to use the computer.
This can't be dismissed as "slippery slope" logic either. Should elderly people with a bank account be allowed to use a computer? They might read something online and give their savings to a scammer. Frankly, that's a far more convincing argument than the one given here. There's only one solution if your objective function is exclusively to minimize the possibility of a security incident.
Whoa there, am I missing something, why so aggressive and immediately with the ad homs?
I think by that logic dangerously-skip-permissions and openclaw should've never been a thing. I agree that people use them too liberally, but I think at some point you have to find a balance between systemic safety risks and individual freedom.
> Tags and banners do not work. Completely understandable that someone as dismissive and seemingly isolated as you wouldn’t understand that.
One can reduce every tool to a toy and justify it with some hand-wavy security slop, but removing capabilities destroys use cases.
The ability to control your tools is good. You should be able to run anything on your devices. Therefore, those who propose the toyification of tools should carry the burden of justifying the change.
The same infantilization of users currently happens with Signal, where high-level decision makers are asked by strangers to share their deepest secrets. Since these strangers introduce themselves very nicely, users start blurting out their secrets. ... now everyone is pretending this is a Signal problem. It is not. The world is not a kindergarten and people have agency.
A good compromise is to set a safe mode as the default and include an option that lets users confirm they know what they are doing. Obsidian already does this. Given that, I do not understand why anyone would demand to make the entire tool worse.
I wonder: What level of user effort would make you comfortable with users exiting safe modes? Would you want users to be able to run software with full permissions at all?
Since we have your attention here, let me go on an unrelated note and ask whether you could look into Noteplan's workflow and see if you can add some of the required functionalities to enable replication of its workflow (https://help.noteplan.co/article/160-weekly-planning)?
Plugins like Tasks do offer a Query functionality that allows me to list e.g. weekly tasks on my daily template, replicating most of Noteplan's workflow, except Noteplan relies on being able to easily link those tasks into daily template by drag and dropping them, which internally assigns a unique but hidden by default ID in ^129abz notation (https://help.noteplan.co/article/138-synced-blocks). The latter is already supported by Obsidian, it's just not as "clean" and, AFAIK, impossible to get done when drag and dropping.
Idk, I've always thought it was odd that the "community plugins" settings pane seemed more concerned with assuring the user that community plugins were fine than actually explaining the risk.
There is literally a single sentence about the fact that plugins "may cause data integrity and security issues", and it is hedged with the mealy-mouthed modifier "like any other software you install". The absolute majority of it - maybe 80% of the text by window height - is about the measures Obsidian does to vet and secure plugins. All of it appears to be written with the intent to placate any concerns.
Is this the safety warning? The screen that says that community plugins could cause issues "like any other software", but they're actually super safe and vetted and totally fine? Is it surprising that a person, faced with a screen like this, would be susceptible to a social engineering attack?
To replicate this attack you have to also reject two more safety warnings. The user has to accept a shared vault (you have to click "trust author of this vault"), and you have to activate syncing remote plugins.
The first safety warning assures the user that "plugin security is important to [Obsidian]". That Obsidian plugins undergo initial code review by Obsidian themselves. That "many" plugins are open source and that Obsidian has a "large community of developers who watch out for each other". (At this point I'm not sure how this screen even qualifies as a safety warning. Seems more like a billboard for enabling plugins?)
Given that vaults are just Markdown documents, and plugins are so safe (or so Obsidian seems to claim), why should a person feel at all concerned clicking yes to these prompts? Is it still a social engineering attack when the app appears to encourage you along the way? Are these even safety warnings, or just (vaguely encouraging) confirmation dialogs?
I don't see how Obsidian should come off as completely blameless here. They've always tacitly encouraged this wild west plugin ecosystem, because it's an obvious generator of value. They don't get to absolve themselves of any responsibility by pointing at safety warnings, when those "safety warnings" spend (far!) more time explaining why the user might want to click "yes" than "no".
To be clear, I like and use (and pay for!) Obsidian. But the design of Obsidian plugins was clearly broken from the beginning, and the official messaging around them has always been more encouraging than wary. This sort of event is an absolutely inevitable consequence of those decisions.
You're looking at a different screen than the ones required to replicate this attack. To replicate this attack you have to agree three separate times to increasingly scary messages.
Yes it would be good to make it less easy to shoot yourself in the foot. However, I believe users should be in control. People should be able to do powerful things if they choose to. But that will always come with the risk of misuse or social engineering.
This is a misleading headline. It makes it seem like another supply chain attack where some good plug-in was taken over and used to deliver malware. Thats not the case here. Victims are invited to collaborate on a synced vault which comes preloaded with a non official plug-in that delivers the rat. Very very different story
The headline on HN is different: "Obsidian plugin was abused to deploy a remote access trojan". It's not a plugin that was abused, but the ability for shared vaults to contain plugins.
I really like Obsidian. I use it every day and I don't use any community plugins because the permissions aren't up to snuff. I hope for a day where a plugin defines what it will need and that gets presented to me as a user.
I have to imagine the Obsidian team is going to respond seriously to this and I look forward to seeing what they do. They have my full confidence. I'm surprised the system was initially designed as it is without those better permissions and sandboxing, though.
I started using it too when I got sick of using VS Code to look at md. Glad I never had the need to install any plug-ins! Very poor form on their part from what I can tell.
> The victim is prompted to enable the "Installed community plugins" synchronization feature.
Obsidian has the proper protections in place to prevent this type of attack, and the victims are being convinced to ignore them. This is just a successful social engineering event. I hate to see Obsidian dragged down by this headline, since this attack is not exploiting a vulnerability in it or its plugin system.
>Due to technical limitations, Obsidian cannot reliably restrict plugins to specific permissions or access levels. This means that plugins will inherit Obsidian's access levels. As a result, consider the following examples of what community plugins can do:
Community plugins can access files on your computer.
Community plugins can connect to internet.
Community plugins can install additional programs.
Obsidian has no protection at all. Installing a plugin gives it full access to your computer.
This was only a matter of time, and honestly I think it's inexcusably negligent that they shipped a plugin system like this at all since about 2010 (or arguably much earlier).
It does give full access but Obsidian does tell you that. Community plugins are not enabled by default, you have to enable them manually. Same happens with a shared vault: once you get it you still have to manually enable plugins. So far no one managed to sneak in a plugin completely unnoticed.
To make an actual counter, you need numbers. If only a tiny niche of users use it without community plugins, then yes, it's unusable (in a practical definition of the term)
I rely on Advanced URI, which opens certain functionality up to external apps. I use Raycast and with Cmd+Space, it lets me open vaults or daily notes.
And Obsidian_to_Anki, but that's probably just me because I have no clue how to use Anki otherwise.
An ADD/SUM feature on tables was the first plugin I installed. It could be argued this should be part of the TABLE but I guess the dev team has a lot on their plate not to mention I'm not even sure if there's a feature request for this ability.
Yeah, I don't use any community plugins. I take notes in obsidian. And it turns out, having multiple years worth of notes and todos in a tree of crosslinked markdown files is pretty handy in this AI era. I take notes in obsidian and run the Gemini cli from my vault. Works a treat.
All I want is a top-notch Markdown editor with a mobile app and trustworthy sync, and that's what Obsidian gives me. And if ever Obsidian goes away or is enshittified, I'll still have a perfectly good folder of Markdown documents that I can take elsewhere.
They are irrelevant for this dispute, because these problems do not concern them. And the amount of people using plugins because of some real demand is not low.
The parent comment says that Obsidian is not usable without plugins and it's simply nonsense. It would be very charitable to call this a "dispute."
Could Obsidian handle plugin permission better? I guess so. But that doesn't mean the users have to use plugins. It's ultimately the user's choice. Blender has zero security guards over the addons besides the OS's and the ecosystem thrives. So does Minecraft. These communities are essentially "arbitrary Python/Java code goes brrrr."
The discussion about the plugin-system, and the people who need it to which degree.
> The parent comment says that Obsidian is not usable without plugins and it's simply nonsense.
Sure, fair. But the comment happened in the context of talking about the plugin-system, and parent comment seems on the side that for them obsidian is worthless without plugins. Saying that other people have no need for them is pointless, because they are not in the picture. Phrasing could indeed be better, but talking about people who are not concerned by the problem is not really adding anything to the discussion.
Seriously though, I agree with your sentiment that community plugin security can and needs to be improved, but how does someone saying they use it every day "disregard software usability as a formal discipline, along with decades of UX research and standards"
The attack here requires not just enabling community plugins, but also syncing the attacker's vault to your computer, and also separately enabling the synchronization of the attacker's plugins with yours.
Obsidian Plugins are still incredibly vulnerable. A compromised plugin will essentially take over your machine. There's no sandboxing of any kind. It's even more insecure than browser extensions (that could steal your auth tokens, but at least don't have unfettered access to your filesystem).
This is really unfortunate. I love Obsidian and am a paid subscriber for many years, but the community plugins needs a security overhaul asap, before someone gets hurt.
Not even slightly. Browser extensions are a trivial counter-example, as are all flatpacks, and anything restricted by user/group. That covers probably literally a majority of all software on your computer, because people have been voluntarily restricting their software to protect you from their potential accidents for decades.
In practise, Flatpak packages have many more permissions than you might expect, and the sandbox feature gives a false sense of security. For example, the Obsidian Flatpak package [0] is given all of the following abilities without explicit permission from the user (the user has to know where to look to find out about them):
- Home folder read/write access
- System folder media
- System folder mnt
- Microphone access and audio playback
- And more...
The Obsidian snap [1] is installed with the --classic flag, which also grants access to the whole home directory, but at least you have to consciously specify the --classic flag to grant this permission.
> That covers probably literally a majority of all software on your computer
If you're running GNU/Linux, chances are you'll have hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of software that run totally unsandboxed.
Yes, a very small minority of applications are unfortunately primarily distributed via flatpak or snap, and the distributors don't care about the user experience, so it's error-ridden and problem-ridden, but chances are you can get a "normal computer program" version of it unencumbered by such grossness.
And tons won't be part of e.g. root, or dialout (to pick one I've had to deal with a lot lately), or many other more-privileged-than-default groups, yes. That's a permissions system working as intended.
Besides. They said "all software on your machine". That is trivially false, to a significant degree.
I was pointing out that the claim that "literally a majority of all software on your computer" runs sandboxed is also trivially false, to a significant degree
I think that's especially important to point out because it reminded me of a blog post by Obsidian that also was discussed here[1], where they talked about reducing supply chain risk by not relying on dependencies, but people quickly pointed out that this is only possible because users depend so heavily on extensions. Just look at that top comment and here we are now.
This combination of software relying on third parties without security seems to be untenable. Personally I've gotten rid of just about as many extensions as I can anywhere and switched to batteries included software.
Krita: that is a decision by Krita(/GIMP) and not anything inherent in "plugins" or "python" - it could be a bubblewrap/firejail contained process, for example (other OSes have similar-ish options but there's always something, e.g. don't use cpython). They have chosen to continue to put their users at risk by not doing anything at all like that.
There are of course complications, costs, and downsides associated with doing that. It might not be worth it currently, or performance costs might be too high, or the community might be overwhelmingly using abandoned plugins that won't be updated, etc. It's still a decision to remain complacent until forced by attacks though, it's well beyond common knowledge that these things happen so you can't really call it ignorance.
Software engineers at large would benefit from playing World of Warcraft, and seeing the ongoing fight between Blizzard and add-on authors.
WoW's whole UI is built in the same Lua environment as add-ons, and Blizzard has implemented some interesting restrictions (like the taint system[0]) to prevent add-ons from completely automating gameplay.
If you happen to use the WoW example in the future, the wiki efforts moved from the fandom one to wiki.gg[0], as voted by maintainers and contributors in late 2023[1].
Thanks! I've been meaning to read up on taint systems, looks interesting :)
I'm somewhat convinced that taint-influenced capabilities is a good future model to pursue. Computers are fast, I'm fairly confident that it chould be done at whole-computer scale and still be reasonable... though probably not with a million electron apps. Which is likely a good thing in aggregate (I say as a fan of web tech and the very compelling features such things offer. Great for minor or PoC, not for major pieces of software).
World of Warcraft is one of the most popular MMO's ever made.
You simply can't expect every software that wants a plugin system to have the same security practices as the most used software in the world.
In fact, there are many reasons why you might want a plugin to have full filesystem and internet access, such as batch processing or simply adding things directly from webpages. Sandboxing this will just make plugins less useful.
In the end it's a problem of trust. You're installing software from untrustworthy developers because you trust the name of the application those plugins are associated with.
You could fix the problem in Obsidian, but the same problem will happen in other software. Some of which simply can't justify bothering with sandboxing plugins. This is just the way plugins are.
> You simply can't expect every software that wants a plugin system to have the same security practices as the most used software in the world.
I'm not saying that I think they should, or that I expect them to. I'm saying that it's one particular implementation of sandboxing that has a bunch of interesting properties, and that makes it worth studying.
I'm not sure I agree or understand where you're coming from.
Side-loaded Android apps are still bound by all the same permission restrictions as any app installed by the Play Store. The only difference is Google didn't review it (for what little good that does) and that I didn't get the app from Google.
If I side-load a camera app, it still has to ask for camera privileges the same way any Play store app does.
Is there something in your message I missed about how it relates to this article or is this just being uninformed about side-loading?
I remember reading that page sometime pre-COVID, and being surprised at just how ridiculous it was. It started strong with “The Obsidian team takes security seriously”, but then almost everything else on the page led me to believe they didn’t actually take security very seriously.
I agree with the claim of negligence. I think they were more than happy to reap the benefits of a thriving community plugin ecosystem, and were hoping this page would provide enough CYA when security breaches inevitably occurred.
> TIP: If you're working with sensitive data and wish to install a community plugin, we recommend that you perform an independent security audit on the plugin before using it.
I wonder just how many plugins received a security audit.
I use only one plugin because I am aware of the security model (or lack thereof). I only use one because I read the source and am convinced it’s safe. It would be foolish to blindly install many plugins.
Has WASM/WASI DOM-access? When I last read about the architecture, there was a strict separation between WASM, Javascript and the app, but also a movement to allow UI-customization from WASM-space. Many Obsidian-plugins are adding heavy UI-changes, so without that, it would be kinda pointless.
For at least the vast majority, yes definitely. I'm fine with full bypasses existing (say a webgl thing, or web previews, custom VCS integration, there are tons of legitimate reasons to escape a sandbox), but they should be an abnormality with heavy warnings and proportionate community attention to watch for issues, not the only option.
I don't think they meant it this way, but I honestly consider unsafe official plugin systems to be negligent to the point of being actively malicious. By releasing one, if you ever become successful you have explicitly chosen to screw over an unknown number of your users to save yourself a relatively small amount of work in the short term. It might be single digit users, or it might be septuple digit users - is it really worth it?
(Unsafe unofficial plugins, like most games? Mildly unfortunate but I think that's fine. Though a healthy modding community around your stuff should be a VERY STRONG sign that you should introduce a safe version to protect your users, if it won't cause you to implode (it definitely can)).
A program one runs on one's computer can and should be able to do computer things. The alternative road you're advocating for ends in hardware attestation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48086190
* Android's permissions model where the user must approve specific potentially undesirable classes of actions (separate from the 24H delay, etc controversy)
Right, I'm a heavy Obsidian user myself, and love it.
I think the value of this disclosure is more in spreading awareness about plugins, and demonstrating the vector. Where less sophisticated users may think, "Oh, this is just a collection of markdown files. I don't need to be too worried about malicious code."
What are the reasons behind the fact that almost all of these plugin systems are so poorly engineered? Is it too much work (ie, there are no good plugin development frameworks that already enable proper isolation/permission capabilities) or "simply" a widespread lack of knowledge of what is needed, so devs learn only after their own system has been abused? Both? Something else?
At the core, there is the tradeoff between ability and security. You can give the users power and enable them doing fancy shit, or you can make it secure, stripping any meaningful ability. Usually, people prefer ability over security.
The other problem is that security is hard, and just giving generic access and adding some basic guards is simple.
The first trade-off is not precisely stated, you can do "both" with user choice. In this case it would be: no plugin has "all filesystem access" unless user explicitly approves it, and that approval steers the user to a very narrow "plugin folder only" path by the way UI is done. Think this is "secure by default"? You don't undermine any ability here because most plugins don't need any filesystem access, so you get extra security "for free" for most of the users and with only some friction (but still not removing the ability altogether) for the rest.
You’ll need to define the security framework and building blocks that all plugins may need, which takes time to design, implement, verify and maintain.
Much easier to just skip that part.
So yes, it’s too much work (in the sense that you need to have a security-focused leadership that understands that this is a lot of work but the right thing to do).
Web stack plus lack of resources to architect the proper interfaces is my guess. These are software written in high level js frameworks, thus using poor dataflow patterns by default, mostly just following what is actually possible instead of employing intentional design, which would require going down some levels of abstraction and maintaining a custom fork of said frameworks. So they probably just architect plug-ins like you would instantiate a library passing a subset of the context the app uses. Basically the simplest workable thing possible. Although the disclosed hack does not mention any particular “vulnerability”. Plug-ins in obsidian are always in god mode, and the alleged hackers just tricked people in using them. Funny how an RCE waiting to happen behind a few popups is ultimately blamed on users. Shame on the developers.
even chrome browser plugins have security issues similar to this case. there are billions of dollars and many smart developers working on it. It's similar to building an app store inside your app. For the Apple app store, they reduce malicious apps by being very strict who/what people can publish and it's behind a paywall.
Because a box is an intuitive way to limit the blast radius of arbitrary code? But the wasn't a requirement, I'd be fine with sandbox-free secure plugin systems
There are tons and tons of successful plugin systems out there that do not have such ridiculous requirements. I have thousands of VSTs installed and have never been RAT'ed. What happened to practicing internet hygiene?
At some point we need to acknowledge the problem is cultural, and address accordingly. I realize that the business objective for many is to make computing as brainless as possible but we need to be pushing back on that.
Instead we have forums full of really smart people demanding a nanny state. Yuck -- what a sad and pathetic state of affairs.
Even being social engineering, the design of the plugin system allowing this means the platform is completely unusable as a sharing tool. It's good to know but to me this is not "I need to remember to have these settings correct to use a shared Obsidian vault", this for is instead "never accept a shared Obsidian vault, demand a plaintext export".
I hope I'm speaking as a minority but when I first started using Obsidian the Youtube videos I watched encourage the usage of community plugins, even with these warnings I would enable the community plugins. You may very well have good actors that eventually turn bad for these plugins and users won't know.
Maybe I just also have a higher personal risk appetite, but even as a dev and knowing these risks I would have enabled the community plugin option. Again, hope I'm just the minority here and not most user behaviour.
My worse fear has materialized.
This is why I've never used an external Obsidian plugin and only my own plugins.
It was only a matter of time before some malicious code ended up in one.
Brother, we are vindicated! There are indeed many cool bits and blobs out there, but I am already trusting one entity to secure my private notes, no way I am taking a pinky-promise from extension XYZ to behave.
I run Obsidian with restricted capabilities: no network access, and no filesystem access outside its own directory. I only enable network access when updating plugins/themes.
Same way I run any other application that could potentially execute untrusted code.
Seems like a nice place to plug my Mac app that syncs your obsidian tasks to Reminders.app: https://turquoisehexagon.co.uk/remindersync (for me the only thing obsidian is missing on a fresh install).
It’s sandboxed; can’t make network connections and can only read the directory you select. I’m surprised Apple haven’t added OS level functionality to block network connections / folder access for non sandboxed apps, similar to running an un-notarised binary.
This is becoming a bit of an epidemic. Not every attack or exploit (and especially not a social engineering one) needs a name out of Metal Gear or a website.
The specific plugins don't matter for this attack. The attack relies on the user accepting a shared vault and trusting the shared plugins. A shared vault can contain plugins that don't come from the official directory.
Thanks! I also scanned the detailed article looking for which plugins were affected and wasn't able to find it. Came to the comments looking for a quicker answer.
One thing that bugged me when I made a community plugin was that you have to attach non-git-controlled files to the release (e.g. main.js).
To check if any community plugin is safe, it seems like you'd have to not only review the code on github, but also analyze the github release files to be sure nothing malicious packed in there.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something about the process, I'd appreciate if anyone could confirm or explain otherwise.
A long time ago I figured that "nasty Obsidian plugins" were not a matter of if, but when.
So I did the (imho) only sensible thing, and run Obsidian in a sandbox (bwrap). By doing so, I also made sure it runs in a separate networking namespace. For now, I disallow any internet access.
The amount of rage I see here is a bit strange, the whole attraction of Obsidian is that you can turn it into a Swiss army knife (that can hurt you too ofc).
@kepano: you would greatly help me if you could force plugin authors to list the urls they want to access inside the manifest, then let the user per url decide if they want to enable it. I still see some stupid plugin authors download their assets from a CDN or a vague website, from deeply buried in their code. Making url depencies explicit helps firewall automation at a first step. Maybe you could revoke direct network access from plugins, but i am not too knowledgeable about Electron.
> So I did the (imho) only sensible thing, and run Obsidian in a sandbox (bwrap). By doing so, I also made sure it runs in a separate networking namespace. For now, I disallow any internet access.
> The amount of rage I see here is a bit strange
Serious question: do you think it is actually obvious and technically accessable to everyday people to have the thought "I should run this in a sandbox" and do it?
Like no this is not some super elite haxxr tool, it's a text editor pretty explicitly advertised as being non-technical-person-friendly.
Love Obsidian but I've previously commented about the security model for plugins here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45308131. TLDR: your entire vault (and possibly filesystem) is exposed to every single plugin you install.
I really do think Obsidian needs 2 things to have any reasonable security:
1. It needs to be a lot more batteries-included. A user shouldn't need a plugin for basic functionality.
2. It needs a granular permission system, where each plugin should have to declare and prompt you to allow or reject specific permissions, just like on iOS and Android. The system should enforce that a plugin cannot bypass this.
> A user shouldn't need a plugin for basic functionality.
What functionality are you thinking of? I just looked and I've never enabled community plugins.
My Obsidian complaint is the opposite. I think its bloated well beyond the initial premise of a markdown editor over a directory of files. I think it was just about perfect right before the introduction of the Canvas feature.
Here are some feature I wish existed in Obsidian without any plugins:
* Dataview [1] (this is now solved with Bases, so I really appreciate that)
* Folder Note [2] (I, and I assume many others come from Notion, and I wish this were a thing)
* Recent files [3]
* A built in calendar [4]
* Link embeds [5] (or something to store previews for pasted links)
* Waypoint [6], or something to create a table of contents
These are just things I wish existed, but whether or not these are 'basic' can be debated. Ultimately I do wish there were a robust permission system for plugins so that personal functionality gaps can be plugged, but without compromising safety.
There are many essential features missing that should be included in the core app for security, compatibility, longevity and for the benefit of new users who prefer to stay clear of plugins.
1) Basic functional search
Search should handle different order of words, misspellings (fuzziness), offer indexing and searching in a larger scope than just titles and aliases (e.g. headers or content), as well as allowing users to customize search priorities. Basically - just include Omnisearch as a core plugin.
2) Basic image preview
Displaying an image on full screen, with panning and zoom, when clicked upon.
3) Full "folder notes" support
Out-of-the-box support for a vault structure where each note has its own dedicated folder where all its attachments are placed. While the basic functionality is present, an external plugin is required to declutter the vault file hierarchy and actually make this approach feasible. Folder notes approach is in my opinion the only way to keep a large vault organized.
4) Basic formatting.
Text coloring. Text alignment and justification. Basic image positioning. Proper text flow wrapping around images. Table formatting (at least a setting minimum column width).
5) Markdown parsing within HTML tags
Basics Markdown features like [[linking]] don't work within a section of text enclosed by HTML tags. And using HTML/CSS is currently required to achieve basic formatting like centered or colored text.
6) Option to use the first h1 tag as the note title
I'm talking about actual support for this and integration with core functionality like search and linking. Useful (sometimes long) titles are an essential part of note-taking and knowledge databases. Meanwhile, filenames are simply semi-unique file system identifiers. Forcing users to use filenames as titles compromises the usefulness of titles and leads to issues with filename / filepath length. In HTML and Markdown, the h1 tag was always intended for the title.
7) Consistent formatting between reading view and editing view
Rendering of content, especially vertical spacing between elements differs between those views for no credible reason. The code syntax highlighter is also deficient in editing mode, despite it being the mode in which Obsidian users spend 99% of their time while writing, editing and reviewing notes.
It's not an exhaustive list, but these are the biggest pain points right now. And let me repeat - you shouldn't continue to rely on community plugins for these features. Even though community plugins are great, they are a security concern, their development could cease at any point, and new users don't know about them.
Obsidian does not have auto update for community plugins. The steps for updating them right now is checking for updates and then updating all or individually.
A bad update to one of the popular plugins could compromise lot of systems.
Am I the only one who thinks Obsidian is perfect without plugins? Half the reason I switched to it from Anytype was that it was rather spartan in its offerings. If they announced tomorrow they would ban plugins, I would not care.
I wouldn't say "perfect", but to me it's clear that adding plugins could only make it worse, even without considering the security issues.
What I want from Obsidian is something that "just works". Adding third-party plugin would break this immediately since the plugins can either be straight up buggy, create conflicts with each other or simply become incompatible with new Obsidian releases.
And what I've seen from the community, with people having dozens of plugins installed, is giving me nightmares.
I can see why some would feel the appeal of plugins, and adding two or three can be fine, as long as you do your due diligence.
Otherwise it's straight shooting you in the foot.
That’s basically how I’m using it since I got wary about how the community plugins were being vetted. Core plugins and settings cover a lot. There’s one or two things I miss, but not enough to fork and review them myself so it’s clearly not essential.
I'm also switching back to Obsidian after a few-year stint on Anytype, and the Notebook Navigator plugin is the only one I have installed. This is (I assume) a UI-only plugin, which shouldn't need access to external network or processes, so a quite good candidate for sandboxed plugins.
You are safe. The way this hack works is that someone online would contact you, share a obsidian valut with you, you open the vault, you download & install a plugin the hacker tells you to install to open the vault.
It's all described in the article if you would like to read it.
The obsidian vault is to already have the chosen plugin pre-selected and is part of the social engineering effort, that's not the main problem.
The issue is that this could happen to anyone who just searches the malicious plugin's name and installs it. Worse if it's a popular one that gets compromised.
I think it’s fundamentally wrong to base your plugin architecture on running user code in the same space as the application. The proper way is to evaluate plugin scripts in an interpreter running in the application, where you expose functionality through functions and state exposed to the script runtime. This means you can A) sandbox everything and B) check for things like permissions or even request permissions at runtime. It’s harder if you use a language like JavaScript for the application since you essentially have a runtime inside a runtime, but it’s possible to run something like Lua inside JS. Since I use an actually good language like Rust I have many good options for scripting, like Rhai. Lua is also a good option. Go also has multiple options including a couple good Lua libraries. These libraries tend to have performance comparable to Python which is more than enough for most plugins in most apps.
Yet another reason to not install anything third-party made. Favor batteries, built-in functionality and reject “Unix philosophy” or whatever bullshit people use to ship incomplete software under guise of.
What is this vibe-coded site? Why does it reiterate the same point 20 time? What are the actual plugins that I need to be on alert for? Chop chop, get to it.
This is just the first detected and reported instance, in all likelyhood such attacks have been happening for some time. When will the fanatic userbsse finally admit that using Obsidian in any enterprise setting is just plain malpractice?
It takes 5 minutes in their Discord channel to see the founders are D&D nerds, not competent engineers. It was never meant for serious work.
> the founders are D&D nerds, not competent engineers
The two are not mutually exclusive. What would you trust more than a nerd? A jock? A spod? An MBA?
Any evidence of other examples if bad engineering you can point to, or are your thoughts on the pluggin system and throwing shade at random groups of people all you've got?
[FYI: I know little of obsidian other than planning to look into it at some point as people I know use and like it. I stepped into this set of comments in case there was something useful I should be passing on to those people]
The attack relies on social engineering to get the victim to disable protections and could just as easily have happened with a plugin for any code editor.
Anyway,
What I like about obsidian is that it can handle a truly huge amount of notes without slowing down, and the notes are just markdown files on disk, so there's no lock in.
I have used evernote, ms one note and zoho notebook before, and had issues with all of them.
That isn't a response to my post, it is a bit of information already present in the thread that isn't relevant to my question followed by a positive review. This suggests that a shill brigade has been attracted to these comments. I suggest you don't do that, it isn't a good look.
well there was this previous issue in the crypto community where it turned out someone was not a competent engineer and should have stuck to their online exchange for magic: the gathering
That said, the headline is misleading. This article is about a social engineering attack that requires the user to actively reject multiple safety warnings in Obsidian. As far as I know this is a proof of concept, I haven't seen any reports of users being affected by this attack.
1. Make community plugins less necessary over time as basic features become part of core
2. Improve the security of community plugins
3. Make it easy to create your own plugins that you can fully trust, e.g. with the recent release of Obsidian CLI
In 2026, applications, third or even first party, don't need to have full-disk access, and are not given either. They see a jailroot environment. I give full disk access to the terminal app, and a handful of others. 90% of them, nope.
At least that's the case in macOS, I'm pretty sure Windows can do that too. Linux of course has had such capability since forever, but I guess most distros you need to manually take care of it.
Would love to enable this for all apps, and add exceptions for the ones that need more access.
I installed Lulu and BlockBlock recently, and want to do more to harden my Mac.
When an app tries to access something outside of its sandbox, you get a notification asking to approve or deny. Full Disk Access I think needs to be explicitly given on System Settings (Privacy & Security -> Full Disk Access).
I have no idea how to do that in Windows though.
If you mean for the security of the app without plugins you can currently inspect the app's code in app.js and review third-party audits:
https://obsidian.md/security
They are not making excuses, they stated clearly why open sourcing it is tangential to this problem at best, and they're not the only user to call out the hijacking of the thread. They have been quite clear about why they keep it closed source, so I don't know why you're making it sound like they are lying to their users.
Your rant about audits has little to do with the article too. Telling everyone we're going to get rug pulled is exactly the kind of performative FUD that is meant to get a reaction more than anything.
Speaking for myself, I'm going to keep using it, because nothing has come close to the convenience and performance. Would love an open source alternative to prove me wrong, but I haven't seen it.
To be fair, when someone comes up with excuses for not making something open source, it comes off as dishonest. Be honest. Say that you want to keep it closed to keep control and make money. There's no need to say otherwise. I do the same. I keep code private to make money. I don't say more than that.
You'll see a plethora of such apps made with LLMs. People will write something custom to meet their own needs and to have the features they need.
If you look at my GitHub profile[1] you'll see that the majority of my time is spent on open source. But my priority is open sourcing the tools and libraries I would want if I were building an alternative to Obsidian (Defuddle, JSON Canvas, Web Clipper, Importer, Flexoki, etc) because I believe all software is ephemeral and that files matter more than apps[2].
Obsidian is a free app made by seven people. If we were purely financially-motivated there are many levers we could have pulled, e.g. adding feature gates, not allowing alternatives to our paid services into the official directory, etc. But as I wrote in the tweet linked above, I have spent decades making open source projects and those have never paid the bills. So yes, there is some financial motivation behind that decision.
[1]: https://github.com/kepano
[2]: https://stephango.com/file-over-app
Some are OK with the use of a closed source note taking app. Perhaps an enterprise version with a different feature set might be useful to companies.
For notes written on my own computer, I use open source software to write and handle the sync myself.
This is a wild take even coming from HN. Nobody needs an excuse to not make something open source.
This sort of entitlement does, and has done, far more damage to the OSS movement than anyone's "excuses" for not open sourcing their code. Full stop.
You can absolutely prefer open source software and choose not to trust closed-source apps. That’s all fair. But treating closed source itself as evidence of deception or impending betrayal is exactly the kind of ideological purity test that makes these conversations exhausting.
The business model is obvious. Sell the sync service.
Either way, that's your opinion.
That's not good enough for open source zealots. That's when you end up being the headliner in an endless flood of blog posts and detailing comments telling everyone you're a 'proprietary evil man'. It's open source or nothing. And how dare you make money.
Is this like a popup? which most people actively accept without blinking
I think plugin/extensions should be a bit harder to run by default. I get the user friction from extra hurdles before using their plugins etc., but I don't think there is an actually safe way to execute arbitrary code, unaudited, without sandboxing, or other restrictions.
There's no protections beyond that, community plugins can do whatever they want. Thankfully, the vast majority of them are open-source.
I know many people swore / swear by the datatables plugin, but now that Bases in core, you can get pretty far without it, no?
IMO that's an issue in and of itself, but it doesn't read that way in the (very unclear) original article.
I use Obsidian because it does not treat me like a child. They can add more nags and banners for normies, but the capabilities should remain.
This can't be dismissed as "slippery slope" logic either. Should elderly people with a bank account be allowed to use a computer? They might read something online and give their savings to a scammer. Frankly, that's a far more convincing argument than the one given here. There's only one solution if your objective function is exclusively to minimize the possibility of a security incident.
I think by that logic dangerously-skip-permissions and openclaw should've never been a thing. I agree that people use them too liberally, but I think at some point you have to find a balance between systemic safety risks and individual freedom.
One can reduce every tool to a toy and justify it with some hand-wavy security slop, but removing capabilities destroys use cases.
The ability to control your tools is good. You should be able to run anything on your devices. Therefore, those who propose the toyification of tools should carry the burden of justifying the change.
The same infantilization of users currently happens with Signal, where high-level decision makers are asked by strangers to share their deepest secrets. Since these strangers introduce themselves very nicely, users start blurting out their secrets. ... now everyone is pretending this is a Signal problem. It is not. The world is not a kindergarten and people have agency.
A good compromise is to set a safe mode as the default and include an option that lets users confirm they know what they are doing. Obsidian already does this. Given that, I do not understand why anyone would demand to make the entire tool worse.
I wonder: What level of user effort would make you comfortable with users exiting safe modes? Would you want users to be able to run software with full permissions at all?
Plugins like Tasks do offer a Query functionality that allows me to list e.g. weekly tasks on my daily template, replicating most of Noteplan's workflow, except Noteplan relies on being able to easily link those tasks into daily template by drag and dropping them, which internally assigns a unique but hidden by default ID in ^129abz notation (https://help.noteplan.co/article/138-synced-blocks). The latter is already supported by Obsidian, it's just not as "clean" and, AFAIK, impossible to get done when drag and dropping.
Idk, I've always thought it was odd that the "community plugins" settings pane seemed more concerned with assuring the user that community plugins were fine than actually explaining the risk.
There is literally a single sentence about the fact that plugins "may cause data integrity and security issues", and it is hedged with the mealy-mouthed modifier "like any other software you install". The absolute majority of it - maybe 80% of the text by window height - is about the measures Obsidian does to vet and secure plugins. All of it appears to be written with the intent to placate any concerns.
Is this the safety warning? The screen that says that community plugins could cause issues "like any other software", but they're actually super safe and vetted and totally fine? Is it surprising that a person, faced with a screen like this, would be susceptible to a social engineering attack?
Given that vaults are just Markdown documents, and plugins are so safe (or so Obsidian seems to claim), why should a person feel at all concerned clicking yes to these prompts? Is it still a social engineering attack when the app appears to encourage you along the way? Are these even safety warnings, or just (vaguely encouraging) confirmation dialogs?
I don't see how Obsidian should come off as completely blameless here. They've always tacitly encouraged this wild west plugin ecosystem, because it's an obvious generator of value. They don't get to absolve themselves of any responsibility by pointing at safety warnings, when those "safety warnings" spend (far!) more time explaining why the user might want to click "yes" than "no".
To be clear, I like and use (and pay for!) Obsidian. But the design of Obsidian plugins was clearly broken from the beginning, and the official messaging around them has always been more encouraging than wary. This sort of event is an absolutely inevitable consequence of those decisions.
Yes it would be good to make it less easy to shoot yourself in the foot. However, I believe users should be in control. People should be able to do powerful things if they choose to. But that will always come with the risk of misuse or social engineering.
"Novel Campaign Abuses Obsidian Note-Taking App to Target Finance and Crypto Professionals with PHANTOMPULSE RAT”
It’s novel (new), an abuse of Obsidian, specifically targeting a group of people.. and the RAT is embedded in the vault.
I have to imagine the Obsidian team is going to respond seriously to this and I look forward to seeing what they do. They have my full confidence. I'm surprised the system was initially designed as it is without those better permissions and sandboxing, though.
Obsidian has the proper protections in place to prevent this type of attack, and the victims are being convinced to ignore them. This is just a successful social engineering event. I hate to see Obsidian dragged down by this headline, since this attack is not exploiting a vulnerability in it or its plugin system.
>Due to technical limitations, Obsidian cannot reliably restrict plugins to specific permissions or access levels. This means that plugins will inherit Obsidian's access levels. As a result, consider the following examples of what community plugins can do:
Obsidian has no protection at all. Installing a plugin gives it full access to your computer.This was only a matter of time, and honestly I think it's inexcusably negligent that they shipped a plugin system like this at all since about 2010 (or arguably much earlier).
Folks will reply "but I use it every day without plugins".
That position disregards software usability as a formal discipline, along with decades of UX research and standards.
Because in general, "usable" means "people use it". Which they do for Obsidian without community plugins without issues.
All I want is a top-notch Markdown editor with a mobile app and trustworthy sync, and that's what Obsidian gives me. And if ever Obsidian goes away or is enshittified, I'll still have a perfectly good folder of Markdown documents that I can take elsewhere.
It's horse hockey. Plenty users use the vanilla Obsidian.
> Folks will reply "but I use it every day without plugins".
Because they do. You're saying that they should lie about their usage to fit your narrative?
They are irrelevant for this dispute, because these problems do not concern them. And the amount of people using plugins because of some real demand is not low.
The parent comment says that Obsidian is not usable without plugins and it's simply nonsense. It would be very charitable to call this a "dispute."
Could Obsidian handle plugin permission better? I guess so. But that doesn't mean the users have to use plugins. It's ultimately the user's choice. Blender has zero security guards over the addons besides the OS's and the ecosystem thrives. So does Minecraft. These communities are essentially "arbitrary Python/Java code goes brrrr."
The discussion about the plugin-system, and the people who need it to which degree.
> The parent comment says that Obsidian is not usable without plugins and it's simply nonsense.
Sure, fair. But the comment happened in the context of talking about the plugin-system, and parent comment seems on the side that for them obsidian is worthless without plugins. Saying that other people have no need for them is pointless, because they are not in the picture. Phrasing could indeed be better, but talking about people who are not concerned by the problem is not really adding anything to the discussion.
Seriously though, I agree with your sentiment that community plugin security can and needs to be improved, but how does someone saying they use it every day "disregard software usability as a formal discipline, along with decades of UX research and standards"
Obsidian Plugins are still incredibly vulnerable. A compromised plugin will essentially take over your machine. There's no sandboxing of any kind. It's even more insecure than browser extensions (that could steal your auth tokens, but at least don't have unfettered access to your filesystem).
This is really unfortunate. I love Obsidian and am a paid subscriber for many years, but the community plugins needs a security overhaul asap, before someone gets hurt.
- Home folder read/write access
- System folder media
- System folder mnt
- Microphone access and audio playback
- And more...
The Obsidian snap [1] is installed with the --classic flag, which also grants access to the whole home directory, but at least you have to consciously specify the --classic flag to grant this permission.
[0] - https://flathub.org/en/apps/md.obsidian.Obsidian
[1] - https://snapcraft.io/obsidian
flatpacks have access to all my files, they would be useless without. And they are the only sensitive files in my computers
If you're running GNU/Linux, chances are you'll have hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of software that run totally unsandboxed.
Yes, a very small minority of applications are unfortunately primarily distributed via flatpak or snap, and the distributors don't care about the user experience, so it's error-ridden and problem-ridden, but chances are you can get a "normal computer program" version of it unencumbered by such grossness.
Besides. They said "all software on your machine". That is trivially false, to a significant degree.
This combination of software relying on third parties without security seems to be untenable. Personally I've gotten rid of just about as many extensions as I can anywhere and switched to batteries included software.
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45307242
If you install a dozen mini-apps from random developers you never heard about, you can't complain if one is malware.
Krita also has a plugin system based on Python. Any "plugin" has the same level of access as running a python script.
Personally I blame operating systems for not providing a way to isolate how programs interact with user files.
There are of course complications, costs, and downsides associated with doing that. It might not be worth it currently, or performance costs might be too high, or the community might be overwhelmingly using abandoned plugins that won't be updated, etc. It's still a decision to remain complacent until forced by attacks though, it's well beyond common knowledge that these things happen so you can't really call it ignorance.
WoW's whole UI is built in the same Lua environment as add-ons, and Blizzard has implemented some interesting restrictions (like the taint system[0]) to prevent add-ons from completely automating gameplay.
0. https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Secure_Execution_and_Tainti...
0. https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Secure_Execution_and_Tainting
1. https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Wowpedia:About_the_wiki#Bac...
I'm somewhat convinced that taint-influenced capabilities is a good future model to pursue. Computers are fast, I'm fairly confident that it chould be done at whole-computer scale and still be reasonable... though probably not with a million electron apps. Which is likely a good thing in aggregate (I say as a fan of web tech and the very compelling features such things offer. Great for minor or PoC, not for major pieces of software).
You simply can't expect every software that wants a plugin system to have the same security practices as the most used software in the world.
In fact, there are many reasons why you might want a plugin to have full filesystem and internet access, such as batch processing or simply adding things directly from webpages. Sandboxing this will just make plugins less useful.
In the end it's a problem of trust. You're installing software from untrustworthy developers because you trust the name of the application those plugins are associated with.
You could fix the problem in Obsidian, but the same problem will happen in other software. Some of which simply can't justify bothering with sandboxing plugins. This is just the way plugins are.
I'm not saying that I think they should, or that I expect them to. I'm saying that it's one particular implementation of sandboxing that has a bunch of interesting properties, and that makes it worth studying.
If I side-load a camera app, it still has to ask for camera privileges the same way any Play store app does.
Is there something in your message I missed about how it relates to this article or is this just being uninformed about side-loading?
I agree with the claim of negligence. I think they were more than happy to reap the benefits of a thriving community plugin ecosystem, and were hoping this page would provide enough CYA when security breaches inevitably occurred.
> TIP: If you're working with sensitive data and wish to install a community plugin, we recommend that you perform an independent security audit on the plugin before using it.
I wonder just how many plugins received a security audit.
I don't think they meant it this way, but I honestly consider unsafe official plugin systems to be negligent to the point of being actively malicious. By releasing one, if you ever become successful you have explicitly chosen to screw over an unknown number of your users to save yourself a relatively small amount of work in the short term. It might be single digit users, or it might be septuple digit users - is it really worth it?
(Unsafe unofficial plugins, like most games? Mildly unfortunate but I think that's fine. Though a healthy modding community around your stuff should be a VERY STRONG sign that you should introduce a safe version to protect your users, if it won't cause you to implode (it definitely can)).
That's what make obsidian plugins useful. It it's just for having themes , there is no need for them
* Android's permissions model where the user must approve specific potentially undesirable classes of actions (separate from the 24H delay, etc controversy)
* Optional sandboxing
I think the value of this disclosure is more in spreading awareness about plugins, and demonstrating the vector. Where less sophisticated users may think, "Oh, this is just a collection of markdown files. I don't need to be too worried about malicious code."
The other problem is that security is hard, and just giving generic access and adding some basic guards is simple.
Much easier to just skip that part.
So yes, it’s too much work (in the sense that you need to have a security-focused leadership that understands that this is a lot of work but the right thing to do).
https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
At some point we need to acknowledge the problem is cultural, and address accordingly. I realize that the business objective for many is to make computing as brainless as possible but we need to be pushing back on that.
Instead we have forums full of really smart people demanding a nanny state. Yuck -- what a sad and pathetic state of affairs.
Maybe I just also have a higher personal risk appetite, but even as a dev and knowing these risks I would have enabled the community plugin option. Again, hope I'm just the minority here and not most user behaviour.
(I actually use LogSeq, but same idea applies).
Same way I run any other application that could potentially execute untrusted code.
It’s sandboxed; can’t make network connections and can only read the directory you select. I’m surprised Apple haven’t added OS level functionality to block network connections / folder access for non sandboxed apps, similar to running an un-notarised binary.
> It enables malicious versions of legitimate Obsidian plugins ('Shell Commands' and 'Hider') that are present in the shared vault.
To check if any community plugin is safe, it seems like you'd have to not only review the code on github, but also analyze the github release files to be sure nothing malicious packed in there.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something about the process, I'd appreciate if anyone could confirm or explain otherwise.
https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-tos/secure-your-work/...
So would a user have to do some kind of `gh attestation verify PATH/TO/YOUR/BUILD/ARTIFACT-BINARY ...`? (assuming the plugin dev provides an sbom?)
So I did the (imho) only sensible thing, and run Obsidian in a sandbox (bwrap). By doing so, I also made sure it runs in a separate networking namespace. For now, I disallow any internet access.
The amount of rage I see here is a bit strange, the whole attraction of Obsidian is that you can turn it into a Swiss army knife (that can hurt you too ofc).
@kepano: you would greatly help me if you could force plugin authors to list the urls they want to access inside the manifest, then let the user per url decide if they want to enable it. I still see some stupid plugin authors download their assets from a CDN or a vague website, from deeply buried in their code. Making url depencies explicit helps firewall automation at a first step. Maybe you could revoke direct network access from plugins, but i am not too knowledgeable about Electron.
> The amount of rage I see here is a bit strange
Serious question: do you think it is actually obvious and technically accessable to everyday people to have the thought "I should run this in a sandbox" and do it?
Like no this is not some super elite haxxr tool, it's a text editor pretty explicitly advertised as being non-technical-person-friendly.
I really do think Obsidian needs 2 things to have any reasonable security:
1. It needs to be a lot more batteries-included. A user shouldn't need a plugin for basic functionality.
2. It needs a granular permission system, where each plugin should have to declare and prompt you to allow or reject specific permissions, just like on iOS and Android. The system should enforce that a plugin cannot bypass this.
What functionality are you thinking of? I just looked and I've never enabled community plugins.
My Obsidian complaint is the opposite. I think its bloated well beyond the initial premise of a markdown editor over a directory of files. I think it was just about perfect right before the introduction of the Canvas feature.
Can I ask, what basic functionality is Obsidian missing in 2026? (I work on the app)
Here are some feature I wish existed in Obsidian without any plugins:
* Dataview [1] (this is now solved with Bases, so I really appreciate that)
* Folder Note [2] (I, and I assume many others come from Notion, and I wish this were a thing)
* Recent files [3]
* A built in calendar [4]
* Link embeds [5] (or something to store previews for pasted links)
* Waypoint [6], or something to create a table of contents
These are just things I wish existed, but whether or not these are 'basic' can be debated. Ultimately I do wish there were a robust permission system for plugins so that personal functionality gaps can be plugged, but without compromising safety.
References: [1] https://blacksmithgu.github.io/obsidian-dataview/ [2] https://github.com/xpgo/obsidian-folder-note-plugin [3] https://github.com/tgrosinger/recent-files-obsidian [4] https://github.com/liamcain/obsidian-calendar-plugin [5] https://github.com/Seraphli/obsidian-link-embed [6] https://github.com/IdreesInc/Waypoint
1) Basic functional search
Search should handle different order of words, misspellings (fuzziness), offer indexing and searching in a larger scope than just titles and aliases (e.g. headers or content), as well as allowing users to customize search priorities. Basically - just include Omnisearch as a core plugin.
2) Basic image preview
Displaying an image on full screen, with panning and zoom, when clicked upon.
3) Full "folder notes" support
Out-of-the-box support for a vault structure where each note has its own dedicated folder where all its attachments are placed. While the basic functionality is present, an external plugin is required to declutter the vault file hierarchy and actually make this approach feasible. Folder notes approach is in my opinion the only way to keep a large vault organized.
4) Basic formatting.
Text coloring. Text alignment and justification. Basic image positioning. Proper text flow wrapping around images. Table formatting (at least a setting minimum column width).
5) Markdown parsing within HTML tags
Basics Markdown features like [[linking]] don't work within a section of text enclosed by HTML tags. And using HTML/CSS is currently required to achieve basic formatting like centered or colored text.
6) Option to use the first h1 tag as the note title
I'm talking about actual support for this and integration with core functionality like search and linking. Useful (sometimes long) titles are an essential part of note-taking and knowledge databases. Meanwhile, filenames are simply semi-unique file system identifiers. Forcing users to use filenames as titles compromises the usefulness of titles and leads to issues with filename / filepath length. In HTML and Markdown, the h1 tag was always intended for the title.
7) Consistent formatting between reading view and editing view
Rendering of content, especially vertical spacing between elements differs between those views for no credible reason. The code syntax highlighter is also deficient in editing mode, despite it being the mode in which Obsidian users spend 99% of their time while writing, editing and reviewing notes.
It's not an exhaustive list, but these are the biggest pain points right now. And let me repeat - you shouldn't continue to rely on community plugins for these features. Even though community plugins are great, they are a security concern, their development could cease at any point, and new users don't know about them.
A bad update to one of the popular plugins could compromise lot of systems.
What I want from Obsidian is something that "just works". Adding third-party plugin would break this immediately since the plugins can either be straight up buggy, create conflicts with each other or simply become incompatible with new Obsidian releases.
And what I've seen from the community, with people having dozens of plugins installed, is giving me nightmares.
I can see why some would feel the appeal of plugins, and adding two or three can be fine, as long as you do your due diligence. Otherwise it's straight shooting you in the foot.
I say shiny horse statue.
The issue is that this could happen to anyone who just searches the malicious plugin's name and installs it. Worse if it's a popular one that gets compromised.
It takes 5 minutes in their Discord channel to see the founders are D&D nerds, not competent engineers. It was never meant for serious work.
The two are not mutually exclusive. What would you trust more than a nerd? A jock? A spod? An MBA?
Any evidence of other examples if bad engineering you can point to, or are your thoughts on the pluggin system and throwing shade at random groups of people all you've got?
[FYI: I know little of obsidian other than planning to look into it at some point as people I know use and like it. I stepped into this set of comments in case there was something useful I should be passing on to those people]
Anyway, What I like about obsidian is that it can handle a truly huge amount of notes without slowing down, and the notes are just markdown files on disk, so there's no lock in. I have used evernote, ms one note and zoho notebook before, and had issues with all of them.
I know absolutely nothing about Obsidian but I'd expect quite a few competent engineers to also be D&D nerds no!?
Are you saying the two are mutually exclusive?