Security of the plugins

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It is not possible because there are many many many ways a plugin could connect to the internet:

  • By using the NodeJS http/https module
  • By using XMLHttpRequest browser API
  • By using the browser’s “fetch” API
  • By inserting an <image>, <audio>, <video>, and many other HTML elements containing a src property which will make the engine fetch a URL as if it’s some kind of resource
  • By inserting an <iframe>, opening a new BrowserWindow, etc, which can open any page on the internet
  • By adding a CSS property for background-image, font-family, etc which will fetch those resources at any URL.
  • By executing another executable on your computer using the child_process NodeJS module, such as wget.
  • By storing a script in an auto-run location such as .bash_rc, using the fs NodeJS module.
  • And many many more. Possibly hundreds of other methods that we are not even aware of.

This is a huge attack surface, while we can plug those holes one-by-one and cripple the ability of plugins to do useful work, you can’t take into account the unknown ways a malicious player will be able to exploit.

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