Network Connections (Network Traffic)

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1

All the instances where obsidian generates network traffic

  1. When you open one of your notes that embeds online content. For example, an image ![cat](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Cat_poster_1.jpg)
  2. Periodically check for updates (can be disabled in the settings)
  3. When you access your Obsidian account in Settings
  4. When you use Obsidian Sync
  5. When you use Obsidian Publish
  6. When you browse/download third-party themes
  7. When you browse/download third-party plugins
  8. If you have third party plugins enabled, there is a check, done once every 12 hours from the time the app starts up, which fetches a file hosted on GitHub we use to issue “plugin deprecations”. This file is used to remotely disable specific versions of plugins that are known to malfunction, cause data loss, or could potentially be vulnerable or malicious.
  9. The plugins you enable can also generate network traffic

Bonus:

  • DNS requests if a hostname needs to be resolved before establishing a connection (including DNS over HTTPS).
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3

Not that I’m not trusting you, but I just want to brute force all supporting evidence for that. How do I check these statements, and how do I know if my checking tool is not compromised?

4

Install a traffic monitor and look for yourself.

5

I wanted click-to-load for online content, instead of automatically loading remote resources like images and embeds. So I blocked the Obsidian executable in the firewall.
In the space of 8 minutes it logged 700 firewall events, outbound towards the following IP addresses:

104.18.12.173
104.18.13.173
104.21.68.203
172.67.198.115
2606:4700:3036::6815:44cb
2606:4700:3036::ac43:c673
2606:4700::6812:cad
2606:4700::6812:dad
fe80::1227:f5ff:fe12:8a70

The IPv4 ones are Cloudflare from San Francisco, but I don’t know what it’s about.

I’m not signed in, don’t have automatic updates turned off in settings, and these are my community plugins:

[
  "calendar",
  "obsidian-editor-shortcuts",
  "nldates-obsidian",
  "obsidian-wikipedia"
]
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