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.
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.