Re: How to make Emacs more secure?

Tim Landscheidt <[email protected]> writes:

> Philip Kaludercic <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>>> […]
>
>>>> 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.
>
>>> Ah!  Very nice.  I find it always very icky that
>>> list-packages & Co. just offer an "Install" button, but no
>>> way to inspect the code before enabling it (or just reading
>>> it to check whether it is useful for an intended purpose).
>
>> We have had `package-vc-checkout' for a while now, which check out the
>> source code behind a package in a directory of your choice.
>
> While useful (and something I was unaware of until now :-)),
> this is not quite the same as "these are the exact files
> that will be installed when you press 'Install'".

That _is_ a sub-feature, since when installing or upgrading, you can
browse the extracted files from the archive, before they are processed
for installation and decide to reject installing the package because of
that.

> Tim