Hacker News Reader

Comment by AdrianCX | Hacker News Reader

Just did a quick search, OpenVSX has no extension signing?, no verifications?, what year is this...

This could have been avoided by having extensions signed by company doing them with keys and review

Yeah OpenVSX security is a joke, they also have dumb search algorithm which allows for easy squatting of similar-looking extension names so they show up in search first when you look for official extensions. There were quite a few prominent hacks done that way. I think Microsoft likes OpenVSX situation because it allows them to claim their proprietary VSCode marketplace to be more secure.

Then why even allow employees to use that?

Binance got a pretty expensive lesson if that was the cause for their recent hack

There is no alternative really. Cursor was the market leader in LLM-assisted IDE experience before SpaceX acquisition, though Elon nerfed the product a lot in recent months. And there is still no good alternative to it. Google tries to compete via Antigravity, but that also uses OpenVSX. I myself use Cursor and use Claude there installed via OpenVSX, and was not affected only thanks to my laziness (I saw upgrade button, but became distracted and did not click). I hope this situation will become a trigger to improve OpenVSX security.

Why not use claude code directly?

Why risk getting compromised like that?

Well for me, as developer on a modern stack, there is always some risk involved. If not from agentic tools, then the package registries are compromised left and right, so it all comes down to mitigating the risk. I use Claude, Codex and Cursor/SpaceX agents, and Cursor comes very convenient to have all three in a single interface. Also I still code manually especially when prototyping, so having an IDE helps with it as well. I knew about OpenVSX situation with the search, so when installing extensions I always did triple-checking to verify the extension being really submitted by upstream and not by squatter; but now given upgrades can also deliver a compromise I am thinking of developing an extension that will act in similar manner to pnpm minimum release age.

To anyone who might be reading this exchange, actually there is recently added builtin setting for delayed auto-update, `extensions.autoUpdateDelay`, see https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/316867 and https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/321039

Vscode(ium) extensions are also pretty weak security wise in general. There's little guardrails on what an extension can do.

On publishing, I do see that the MS marketplace has much better typosquatting and rogue publisher protection. It's unclear to me how much better their SAST/scanning is than OpenVSX. Both have something, but both have been fooled many times, and recently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com