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submitted 7 months ago by wisha@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/13397700

Malicious KDE theme can wipe out all your data

Or is it just buggy?

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[-] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Ok, then a bad actor could enumerate all the subdirs and delete them one by one.

Even if going down this path would be a good solution, I don't think this is rm's job to do. This should be done by ~~an antivirus~~ a security suite. I think I have read that for the past few years the kernel now has a better API than inotify to get notified by file operations. I don't remember it's name, but I think it was even mentioned in the docs that security software is a use case of it

[-] baseless_discourse@mander.xyz 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

This is not a defense against bad actor, but defense against bugs in bash script, which is quite common. Another idea is to introduce a new trash command xdg-trash to replacerm. But both of these cannot stop malicious actors removing your file.

I think even if we have a security suite, it is unlikely to detect bad actor recursively enumerating the file and delete them one by one, until many files were irrversably lost.

Antivirus has never been a proper way to achieve security, I think the proper way to defend against offensive rm is probably sandboxing.

this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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