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Malicious Plugin in Pidgin (Chat Application) (pidgin.im)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

16 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Greetings everyone. It is with much regret that I am writing this post. A plugin, ss-otr, was added to the third party plugins list on July 6th. On August 16th we received a report from 0xFFFC0000 that the plugin contained a key logger and shared screen shots with unwanted parties.

We quietly pulled the plugin from the list immediately and started investigating. On August 22nd Johnny Xmas was able to confirm that a keylogger was present.

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[–] [email protected] 87 points 2 months ago (4 children)

It went unnoticed at the time that the plugin was not providing any source code and was only providing binaries for download. Going forward, we will be requiring that all plugins that we link to have an OSI Approved Open Source License and that some level of due diligence has been done to verify that the plugin is safe for users.

Unfortunate that this happened, but at least they are forcing more transparency to try to minimize the ability to hide behind opaque code.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Without some sort of reproducible builds (which are really finnickey to actually get) this doesn't really help though. Adding some set of malicious patches before doing the binary release is trivial.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

You don't need reproducible builds. You can get by if you trust whoever compiled it, like your distro's maintainers or the pidgin developers.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago

I agree that reproducible builds would be ideal and modifying binary releases is trivial, but any step forward is better than no review process at all.

There's no such thing as a perfect system. It's all about increasing the number of hoops for an attacker to jump through. This is at least a step in the right direction.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

True. My point was more that it's an improvement, not really a broad solution.