Which Visual Studio Code Extensions Can Be Hacked?
Source: YouTube · John Hammond · published Sep 21, 2023 · 16:34
The researcher analyzed over 50,000 Visual Studio Code extensions for security vulnerabilities, finding that only a small percentage are verified by Microsoft, while many contain potentially exploitable weaknesses 0:00.
Key Takeaways:
• Only 2,554 out of 51,187 extensions are verified by Microsoft 4:25
• The researcher downloaded and analyzed source code from approximately 37,788 GitHub-hosted extensions 6:24
• Using SAST tools, they found 16,781 vulnerabilities across the first 16,000 extensions analyzed 9:42
• About 1,500 extensions had at least one vulnerability, with some containing thousands of security issues 10:21
• Specific findings included command injection vulnerabilities and hardcoded API secrets in popular extensions 14:47
This security research highlights potential risks in the software development toolchain, showing that even tools used to create secure software may contain vulnerabilities 16:00.
Sources:
- 0:00 Introduction to VS Code extensions research project
- 4:25 Verification statistics of VS Code extensions
- 6:24 Automation process for downloading and scanning
- 9:42 Vulnerability count across scanned extensions
- 10:21 Extensions with at least one vulnerability
- 14:47 Examples of specific vulnerabilities found
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First 800 characters of the transcript
there are over 50 000 Visual Studio code extensions available for download on the visual studio Marketplace and this is vs code right you know the tech Senator or IDE that maybe you use to write and develop software so I got to thinking how many of these extensions have vulnerabilities or weaknesses in the code that could be exploited from a security perspective and maybe hacked into or abused I thought that would be kind of a cool research project you know hey how much software that you use for software that helps you write software could be bad but the thing is there are 50 000 of these extensions and more being added each and every day so how could we automate this process and try to think through okay how can we determine if this extension has vulnerabilities so I started to think up a…