tl;dr: A Bitcoin investor was recently scammed out of 9 Bitcoin (worth around $490K) in a fake “Exodus wallet” desktop application for Linux, published in the Canonical Snap Store. This isn’t the first time, and if nothing changes, it likely won’t be the last.
This post turned out longer than I expected. So if you don’t have the time there’s a briefer summary at the bottom under “In summary (the tl;dr)” along with my suggestions on what Canonical should do now.
I used a sentence from the article as the title since I felt it represented the actual issue better, let me know if I should change it.
Essentially, Snap Store has basically no restrictions on publishing new applications, allowing for scammers to impersonate legitimate applications. In this case (and several times in the past) the target was a cryptocurrency wallet, resulting in ~$490,000 worth of bitcoin being stolen.
The “Safe” rating reminds me of this xkcd:
(For comparison, it seems being proprietary is an automatic unsafe rating for any application, which could be considered too extreme in the other direction.)
For comparison, I wonder how vulnerable Flathub (flatpak’s primary repo) is to these kinds of manipulations… Seems like every app manifest there is publicly available and is compiled on their servers, presumably making it easier to spot shady apps and updates, and the submission process requires manual approval.
Another thing that they do that should make the process less vulnerable is they try to get developers involved in packaging their own applications (and have a verified badge, though I’m not sure how rigorous their verification is).
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For comparison, I wonder how vulnerable Flathub (flatpak’s primary repo) is to these kinds of manipulations… Seems like every app manifest there is publicly available and is compiled on their servers, presumably making it easier to spot shady apps and updates, and the submission process requires manual approval.
Another thing that they do that should make the process less vulnerable is they try to get developers involved in packaging their own applications (and have a verified badge, though I’m not sure how rigorous their verification is).