Archive for September 20, 2024

Friday, September 20, 2024

Gaining Access to Anyone’s Arc Browser

xyzeva (via Hacker News):

firestore is a database-as-a-backend service that allows for developers to not care about writing a backend, and instead write database security rules and make users directly access the database.

this has of course sparked a lot of services having insecure or insufficient security rules and since researching that, i would like to call myself a firestore expert.

[…]

  • arc boosts can contain arbitrary javascript
  • arc boosts are stored in firestore
  • the arc browser gets which boosts to use via the creatorID field
  • we can arbitrarily change the creatorID field to any user id

thus, if we were to find a way to easily get someone elses user id, we would have a full attack chain

Hursh Agrawal:

We want to let all Arc users know that a security vulnerability existed in Arc prior to 8/25/24. We were made aware of a vulnerability on 8/25, it was fixed on 8/26. This issue allowed the possibility of remote code execution on users’ computers. We've patched the vulnerability immediately, already rolled out the fix, and verified that no one outside of the security researcher who discovered the bug has exploited it. This means no members were affected by this vulnerability, and you do not need to take any action to be protected.

bhaney:

There are a lot of major security vulnerabilities in the world that were made understandably, and can be forgiven if they’re handled responsibly and fixed.

This is not one of them. In my opinion, this shows a kind of reputation-ruining incompetency that would convince me to never use Arc ever again.

As I wrote before, I thought it was sketchy that they required an account, and it’s also a red flag that the CVE response blog post does not seem to actually be linked from their blog.

Previously:

Unwanted Swift Concurrency Checking

I’m not adopting Swift Concurrency yet—it’s not even available on the OS versions I’m targeting—so my plan was to take advantage of the Swift 5 language mode of the Swift 6 compiler:

The Swift 6 language mode is opt-in. Existing projects will not switch to this mode without configuration changes.

I had SWIFT_VERSION set to 5, and this worked great when compiling my apps with beta versions of macOS 15 and Xcode 16 over the summer. I needed to make some minor updates to my code to compile with Swift 6 but none were related to concurrency.

However, after updating to the release version of Xcode 16 (since macOS 15 won’t run Xcode 15.4), I started getting this error:

Capture of 'buffer' with non-sendable type 'UnsafeMutableBufferPointer<T>' in a `@Sendable` closure; this is an error in the Swift 6 language mode Generic struct 'UnsafeMutableBufferPointer' does not conform to the 'Sendable' protocol (Swift.UnsafeMutableBufferPointer)

from this code:

DispatchQueue.concurrentPerform(iterations: count) { (index) in
    buffer[index] = // …
}

The GCD API is marked with @preconcurrency:

@preconcurrency public class func concurrentPerform(iterations: Int, execute work: @Sendable (Int) -> Void)

but that didn’t stop it from complaining.

I don’t know whether this is a bug, but it’s certainly not what I expected after repeatedly hearing that strict concurrency checking is opt-in. Reading the details:

You can address data-race safety issues in your projects module-by-module, and you can enable the compiler’s actor isolation and Sendable checking as warnings in the Swift 5 language mode, allowing you to assess your progress toward eliminating data races before turning on the Swift 6 language mode.

It seems that you can “enable” the checking as warnings by setting SWIFT_TREAT_WARNINGS_AS_ERRORS to NO, but I don’t want to do that because I do want other types of warnings to be treated as errors. There’s not yet a way to control warnings individually. And, also, I don’t want to see concurrency warnings with every build when I’m not going to be actively fixing them for a while. There is a separate SWIFT_STRICT_CONCURRENCY build setting, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to turn it off, only to minimal, which still reports this warning/error.

I’m not the only one to run into this exact issue. Frank Rupprecht found that the warning can be avoided by assigning the closure to a variable, rather than passing it directly:

let closure = { (index: Int) in
    buffer[index] = // …
}
DispatchQueue.concurrentPerform(iterations: count, execute: closure)

It’s not clear to me whether this is a hack exploiting a compiler bug or a designated opt-out akin to how GCC treats putting an assignment expression in parentheses. But I’m going with this for now because it seems silly to rewrite the code for Swift Concurrency when (a) I’m not using that yet, and (b) GCD is a separate world, anyway.

Jesse Squires discusses a related issue when he does have strict concurrency checking enabled:

I was confronted with this warning in a project recently and I want to share the hack for how I worked around it. The issue was the result of a combination of factors I mentioned above. I was interacting with @preconcurrency APIs and I knew my code was concurrency-safe, but I was unable to accurately express that to the compiler.

[…]

So, we have situation where the Swift compiler is telling us that the closure being captured needs to be @Sendable but we cannot make it @Sendable. It is also telling us that the closure loses its @MainActor but we know that the closure will always be called from the main queue. Because of these two problems, we need to find a way to work around the warnings and coerce the compiler into doing what we want.

I also got a similar error about capturing a non-sendable type when using these methods:

@MainActor func filePromiseProvider(_ filePromiseProvider: NSFilePromiseProvider, fileNameForType fileType: String) -> String

nonisolated func filePromiseProvider(_ filePromiseProvider: NSFilePromiseProvider, writePromiseTo url: URL) async throws

I was already using the queue supplied by the provider, but Swift Concurrency doesn’t know that. Here I was able to silence the error by using:

nonisolated(unsafe) let provider = // …

Finally, I got this error:

Struct 'Notification' does not conform to the 'Sendable' protocol (Foundation.Notification)

with this code:

queue.async(flags: .barrier) {
    DispatchQueue.main.sync {
        f(notification)
    }
}

I’m ensuring that the notification is only used on the main thread, but Swift Concurrency doesn’t realize that. Again, I was able to silence the error using nonisolated(unsafe). It’s not clear to me whether assumeIsolated() might be more appropriate in this situation, but I can’t use it, anyway, because that API doesn’t back deploy far enough.

Previously:

Rewriting Tumblr

Automattic (via Sarah Perez, Slashdot):

Since Automattic acquired Tumblr we’ve made it more efficient, grown its revenue, and worked to improve the platform. But there’s one part of the plan that we haven’t yet started, which is to run Tumblr on WordPress. I’m pleased to say we’re kicking off that project now!

[…]

We’re talking about running Tumblr’s backend on WordPress. You won’t even notice a difference from the outside.

[…]

This won’t be easy. Tumblr hosts over half a billion blogs. We’re talking about one of the largest technical migrations in internet history.

Dave Winer:

This could get a simple colorful user-friendly interface for WordPress, something it’s needed for a long time. WordPress does everything in its UI, Tumblr has its UI better organized for writers and more casual users. If they can move in this direction, it seems that WordPress could be large part of the emerging social web.

Previously:

The End of Pinboard?

John Gordon (Hacker News):

Over the past few years there have been a slowly increasing number of pinboard outages with less communication. While debugging the last outage I purged my local history from the 3rd party Pins iOS app and found that Pinboard was throttling their download API. I could download only 100 of my 50,000 or so pins. (It’s still easy to download the whole set as a file).

That’s ominous, but more importantly Pinboard is a one person show and that person is no longer responding to support emails. Maciej is no longer active on social media that I know of. His Pinboard.in support forum has been quiescent for years. I’ll be researching my micro blog options and I’ll write about what I come up with on tech.kateva.org.

10 years is an eternity on the web. Pinboard had a good run, but it too is passing.

I, too, have see the site become slower and less reliable. Unlike some others, I haven’t had trouble downloading my archive.

ghoomketu:

Wow, the irony is Pinboard, the very service that championed the idea of “Don’t be a free user” is now shutting down (edit: sorry, ok not shutting down officially but apparently it’s in a free fall for quite some time and nobody gives a damn). Their article argued that free services often turn into pump-and-dump schemes, while paid services promise sustainability and better support. Yet here we are, witnessing the demise of a paid service that couldn’t sustain itself.

It’s a stark reminder that even paid models aren’t immune to market forces and operational challenges.

Maybe the real takeaway is that no business model is foolproof, and unless you can self host something you can never know when and how it will end.

Previously:

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