Re: How to make Emacs more secure?

On Sun, May 3, 2026 at 10:32 AM Pierre Rouleau <[email protected]>
wrote:

>
>
> On Sun, May 3, 2026 at 8:34 AM Stéphane Marks <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>
>> Ask them how they secure npm and the javascript zoo including VSCode or
>> whatever their poisons are.  Do they have supply-chain warranties from
>> their vendors? e.g., if they contract with JetBrains, who is responsible
>> for auditing downloaded content and how do they do that?  etc etc.  Your
>> tools don't have to be held to a higher standard than the lowest one
>> they're willing to accept if only because they don't know those tools.
>>
>
> That will be a good question to ask in the spirit of finding ways to audit
> the
> Emacs code.    Security concerns are often dictated by security-concerned
> customers
> and those cannot be easily dismissed.
>
> IMO an approach that is more likely to benefit the Emacs users community
> and
> increase awareness at the same time would be to highlight the ability to
> completely scan and audit the entire Emacs tool ecosystem since all
> Emacs source code is available and all Emacs lisp packages used by
> Emacs as well as all configuration is written in Emacs Lisp which can be
> scanned and audited easily.
>

Aside from a baseline "audit," this feature coming in Emacs 31 will help
for package upgrades.  AFAIK, the same does not exist in VSCode and if
that's an approved tool, then Emacs, used correctly, should exceed VSCode's
default security posture.

*** Packages can be reviewed before installation or upgrade.
The user option 'package-review-policy' can configure which packages
the user should be allowed to review before any processing takes place.
The package review can include reading the downloaded source code,
presenting a diff between the downloaded code and a previous
installation or displaying a ChangeLog.