I think for a while leading up to the recent session stealing hack, there has been a massive amount of positivity from Lemmy users around all kinds of new Lemmy apps, frontends, and tools that have been popping up lately.
Positivity is great, but please be aware that basically all of these things work by asking for complete access to your account. When you enter your Lemmy password into any third party tool, they are not just getting access to your session (which is what was stolen from some users during the recent hack), they also get the ability to generate more sessions in the future without your knowledge. This means that even if an admin resets all sessions and kicks all users out, anybody with your password can of course still take over your account!
This isn’t to say that any current Lemmy app developers are for sure out to get you, but at this point, it’s quite clear that there are malicious folks out there. Creating a Lemmy app seems like a completely easy vector to attack users right now, considering how trusting everybody has been. So please be careful about what code you run on your devices, and who you trust with your credentials!
Do another one, replace the last panels “alpha Lemmy app” to “password manager” lol
edit: for the record I’m not disagreeing with the first comment in this comment chain.
I know we probably aren’t trying every sketchy password manager that is advertised, but the way people are gushing over them and missing the point of the post scared me. Password managers are ultra high risk programs if you aren’t careful. It’s ok if you guys don’t mind losing your identity from an account because of a password manager giving unique passwords to each, but the point of this post is to not lose accounts from letting your guard down with a sketchy app.
The password manager dudes are saying “My house insurance is the best! i can build a new house” and this poster is saying “Avoid putting flammable things in your house so it doesn’t burn down”. Also a high chance their insurance company wont pay out, if you guys mess up badly with a sketchy password manager.
This is why password managers are so heavily pushed. Imagine if you used the same password for Lemmy that you used for your email? Both are now compromised. A unique password for all accounts is the bare minimum you must do.
Although it is worth noting that the recent Lemmy hack didn’t come from a password compromise, but from session token harvesting, which a password change would not really protect against.
Forgive me if I’m mistaken, but wouldn’t logging out of the compromised session be all it would take to end the attack in this case?
Only if logging out actively invalidates session tokens, which appears to have not been the case. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3364
Lol this is not how the hack worked. JWT cookies are encrypted. They don’t contain your password at all. There was no way to reverse engineer from your cookie to your password.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but Lemmys tokens have no expiration, right? So they are effectively username and password combined.
The decoding algorithm can change, which is exactly what happened, invalidating all previously generated tokens. They cannot be decoded to a password though since they are encrypted, meaning shared passwords wouldn’t be an issue (though you should use a password manager to not have this issue in the first place).
Sorry, but that’s literally every online service. For example if you buy a new virtual server it takes like 5 minutes till a Chinese IP starts to try root passwords.
If someone actually wanted to harm Lemmy they’d just DDOS the biggest instances for a month (which would be easy, it’s mostly single servers after all) or attack it with so much spam and large images that storage would break.
Here’s hoping Sync and Boost lead the way
Or better yet, let’s hope Free Software apps lead the way and ditch the proprietary ones.
I’m getting CS-nerd excited about how this is all going to play out. Federated moderation is hard and so many awful, clunky things have been tried before. Are we actually going to see a web-of-trust or reputation system that reaches widespread adoption? It’s gotta be silent and noninteractive as there’s no way to expect normal people to put up with the complexity.
The difference is that when you buy a vps you aren’t handing over all your access creds to random developers.
And “harming lemmy” may be an intent that sparks a DDoS but there are other intentions that should make users wary. Harvesting creds of people who reuse passwords across accounts is an easy example that could have more serious implications to the individual user.
Dude, you can’t trust any Lemmy instance at all. It doesn’t even matter that the code is open source, the instance owner could just compile their own version that sends them every password in plaintext. There is zero guarantee that your password is safe.
Anyone who reuses passwords has been pwned a dozen times already. Just check your own logins here: https://haveibeenpwned.com/
If you reuse passwords online you have a problem, it’s simple as that. Even big companies had breaches that leaked user data, no company is safe. For example one of my old passwords got stolen from Adobe. One from Unreal Engine. And my old logins are currently shared in 2,844 separate data breaches. Not using a password manager with a random password per service nowadays is madness.
Using open source apps, especially with more than one contributor, is currently the best option to be safe from this kind of attack.
Edit: I’m not saying that FOSS is 100% secure because it’s FOSS. I’m just saying it’s the best option we currently have.
It helps, but it’s still not a silver bullet. For example, a Lemmy app could contain no malicious code in its open source repository, but malicious code could still be added to a binary release in an app store.
Voyager (formerly wefwef) is a self-hostable web app, so it doesn’t have this problem. Of course this only means you can inspect the code you’re running. You still have to able to understand the code to be sure it’s not doing anything malicious.
Vojager can be easily modified and deployed. It is actually quite riskier than others if you don’t use trusted deployments
Izzy directly sends over the APKs from GitHub releases. F-Droid does their own builds which is partly why they’re so slow to update.
The safest option would be for Lemmy to implement OAuth and apps that aren’t in some “official front end for xyz website mode” to authorize via OAuth with the backend instead of via credentials.
No, because open source apps need to have enough eyes on them to spot malicious code. And highly complex ones need proper audits and even that might not be enough to catch every fancy vulnerability.
It has happened before. Or somewhat more likely, a contributor provides code that the maintainer merges without looking too hard.
How can an idiot like me tell though, everything is pretty new. I just assume every account I make is a throwaway for now.
OSS does not guarantee security, ever. Please let’s not fall into false sense of security.I
But in this case, if an app is open source, there is a higher chance of discovering that it sends your credentials somewhere else than in closed source app
Oauth2 login support for apps would certainly be very welcome.
I really want this. I haven’t tried any of the apps (other than the one I made) yet because I don’t want to give anyone my password. Oauth support would be so nice.
