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.
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.
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…
🙄
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.
I doubt they even did that, how would they compare it? They probably just dumbly trusted the name.
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.
and EVERY ONE of flatpak packages are verified before being added to the store, doubt that canonical do that
Canonical does check each package. Now they even check each upload manually. Flathub doesn’t check much once an app is on the store.
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)
Just spin up an in-house Snap Store Proxy. Distributed by snap, of course.
Is there even Firefox deb for Ubuntu now?
Yes. But you have to add Firefox’s PPA.
I just use Mint which had regular Firefox in their repo.
They killed that too on ubuntu iirc
Did they? Oh f! That is plain nasty Ubuntu. Sounds alot like lock-in…
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
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I feel like any seasoned Linux user knows to not EVER use the snap store. I’d rather use universal Windows platform apps, to be honest.
I use Snaps, but specifically for Flutter and Android Studio since it’s the easiest setup route for the SDKs. But yeah ideally I’d avoid them, if not only because by trying to replace all Flatpaks/Debs with snaps they’ve made it laughably easy for people to impersonate legit apps and run phishing scams.
Ha ha
