I agree that we should only promote hosting of plugins on the official Apache NetBeans Plugin Portal. If there are reasons why plugin developers think of creating their own update centers, then let's rather collect the reasons and try to resolve these in order to avoid these shadow and potentially risky sources of NetBeans plugins.

For example:

* if the mandatory Quality Criteria for PPUC [1] are missing some security checks, then let's add them to the procedure.

[1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/NETBEANS/Quality+criteria+for+Plugin+Portal+Update+Center

* if verification of plugins is slow, let's agree on some allowed number of verification requests per month/plugin and reasonable reaction time for plugin verifiers.

* if plugin verifiers are still overloaded, let's find more volunteers who will test plugins on a daily basis starting with the requestor him/herself.

Hope this makes sense,

-Jirka

Dne 06. 07. 20 v 20:25 Ernie Rael napsal(a):

Greetings,

If there were some guarantee or even a reasonable expectation of a quick response after requesting validation then I'd be more inclined to accept such a restriction. I am uncomfortable depending on the portal for critical bug fixes in a timely fashion.

Further comments inline.

-ernie

On 7/6/2020 10:13 AM, Jaroslav Tulach wrote:
Hi.
Recently I have noticed discussion explaining how to bypass NetBeans Plugin Portal. The usual way is to create a NetBeans module extension to provide own update center definition and register it in NetBeans Plugin Portal. Once a user downloads such module, the provided update center gets activated and can distribute new updates or new
modules.

Isn't this a security thread? Shouldn't we ban modules that register own update centers?

When we worked on designing the new update center based on Maven central repository, I wanted to benefit from the organizational structure of Maven repository:

- identity of people who publish there is known to some extent
- it is not possible to alter once published content
- there are sources next to each published module

With such constraints we can more properly verify what 3rd party NetBeans extensions do
before we approve them..


I can think of ways, easy ways, to put security violations into a module on the plugin portal. Saying that installing a module, and looking at it for a few minutes (if that long) mitigates security threats from the module is a joke. Might the testing/validation be more extensive than I suspect?


  With modules that bypass our Plugin Portal by installing their
own catalog, we loose any control. Owners of such catalogs can publish anything, anytime
to anyone


That's not true. Only the people who install that plugin are susceptible to malfeasance.


  and change that whenever they want. It's just a matter of time till somebody
exploits that.

Shouldn't we require 3rd party modules available via the default NetBeans Update center to avoid such bypassing and always release new versions via Maven Central and NetBeans
Plugin Portal?

How about only supporting update centers that download from maven central? Since using Maven Central seems to be the primary method of security, this would seem to satisfy security considerations and still allow timely updates.

And are there related RCP issues?

-ernie

PS.

Speaking of PP3, it has two uses. First is building a catalog, second is as a place to look for plugins and/or get information on plugin before downloading them. User browsing has issues, see https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/netbeans-dev/202006.mbox/*3Cc24e9f9e-da9b-e2ab-5ac3-f5fb9b4c750b*40raelity.com*3E__;JSUl!!GqivPVa7Brio!MRNaYRIr3wI3bXWvzWwvlhclhC7nTS9PHAqPwfEOoOrR5mhmzFLucmjd0PccB5LDm1M$



-jt




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