A group of Israeli researchers explored the security of the Visual Studio Code marketplace and managed to "infect" over 100 organizations by trojanizing a copy of the popular 'Dracula Official theme to include risky code. Further research into the VSCode Marketplace found thousands of extensions with millions of installs.
It’s not a theme here, it’s an extension.
I think that’s how themes are distributed for VSCode, right?
With VSCode, everything is an extension.
But the vscode marketplace seems to have filters for themes, so there must be some way to differentiate them.
I think extensions need a permissions system
You declare it in the package.json as a category when publishing. It’s completely self-selected with no oversight, review, or enforced permissions.
Microsoft security practices haven’t changed much over the decades
You can install themes directly from the theme selector.
Even worse, it also previews the theme when selected. I hope that the logic they use for that feature works in a simpler way.
I checked the logic and there is no rce.