alt Hacker NewsSo a program that is specifically designed to edit files and run arbitrary commands on a remote machine... can do so. Not sure where the bananas part comes in. Sending a binary over SSH/SFTP might sound weird at first glance, but VSCode can't assume that your remote machine can access the wider internet, and it needs a reliable way to bootstrap the agent on the remote. Shipping it over the SSH tunnel is the natural solution.
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TRAMP (mentioned in the article) does it without installing anything on remote machine, just SSH, and shell commands. Which sounds more natural to me. Node.js security history, with all due respect, is not shiny. And the problem the author has with VSCode's way, I guess, is not that it can edit files, but that it extends attack surface without real need.
Am I that much of? My reading of the following was that the remotely executed agent pushes commands back to your local vscode.
> [...] VSCode mounts a full-scale invasion: it runs a Bash snippet stager that downloads an agent, including a binary installation of Node. [...]
> It establishes a WebSockets connection back to your running VSCode front-end. The underlying protocol on that connection can:
Using Remote-SSH opens a connection between your local machine and the remote. Only use Remote-SSH to connect to secure remote machines that you trust and that are owned by a party whom you trust. A compromised remote could use the VS Code Remote connection to execute code on your local machine.
— https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod...
The issue is that the model can be the attacker, and use the link back to your host.
The bananas part is that it dumps 500 MB of stuff on the remote side.
I think the actual concern, not well expressed in the blog post, is the fact that node and vscode server are installed on, for instance, a prod machine that (probably) should be very tightly controlled in terms of what software is installed and running. You don't want to unwittingly add to the attack surface