Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I understand how switching someone from Windows+Office to Ubuntu+LibreOffice is a security win. LibreOffice is not an especially safe piece of software.

View on HN

I hope I'm not saying anything wrong here, but from what I'm aware there are two major problems with MS Office that LibreOffice doesn't have:

* It doesn't have all that macro bundling stuff in normal documents that's the source of the whole macrovirus issue.

* It doesn't have any OLE-object-can-run-embedded-EXE-files-on-click-feature.

I'd say that's a huge win.

It takes seconds to turn macros off in Office, far less time than it takes to convert someone to LibreOffice. Meanwhile, straightforward fuzzing is still producing RCEs in LibreOffice.

I imagine AppArmor is configured to minimize the access that LibreOffice has to the rest of the system. Otherwise yeah, vanilla LO is probably not any better than MS Office.

VServer or similar could also work well but might be harder to configure correctly.

If 90+% of a journalist's job is to open documents from sources in an office program, what good does it do to cage exploits in to LibreOffice? Those exploits still get virtually all the data an attacker wants from the journalist.

The data still has to get out though. If LibreOffice doesn't have network access then that can't happen, at least not without an attack on some other systems as well. This protects against generic sort of "drive-by" attacks but if someone is being targeted then yeah, sandboxing the office suite isn't enough.

The AppArmor profile provided by Ubuntu/Distro is likely not going to be very restrictive.

Also modern versions of Office already run in a sandbox on Windows (AppContainer?) so how much are you really gaining?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com