this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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Thunderbird-hardening-automation: Automatically update secure settings for Thunderbird, configure them to your needs (github.com)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by boredsquirrel to c/linux@lemmy.ml
10 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

currently doing a fix of the code, wait for the 0.2 release!

Thunderbird is great, but very complex and possibly insecure and not private.

Threat model is an important key word here. Imagine you would write Mails over Tor/Tails only and need a secure Mail client.

(Btw I can recommend Carburetor Flatpak for that).

Because of this, the thunderbird hardening user.js, similar to the Arkenfox project exists.

But it is a bit too strict for most threat models. Also settings might change or break, and this has no automatic updating mechanism.

(I should upstream the updater)

The user.js is also just a template, so a ton of mostly not needed configs will stay there.

This project makes the setup of the hardening user.js easy.

Once setup, the script is placed in ~/.local/bin and a user systemd service runs it every once in a while.

You can comment out lines if you want to keep certain settings.

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[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 11 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Besides that I don't like its installation is a curl into bash and then the script itself curls data from internet (from another repository https://github.com/HorlogeSkynet/thunderbird-user.js); not a good practice. But besides that point that get ignored anyway...

A tip: You can use in a single sed command multiple -e . So you would need to run sed only once and load the file only once (or only a few times). Like this: sed -e 's/abc/ABC/g' -e 's/def/DEF/g' file.ext and you can have each of them on their own line too:

sed \
-i \
-e 's/abc/ABC/g' \
-e 's/def/DEF/g' \
user.js

Why do you have so many huge block of whitespaces, such as 10 empty lines in row, multiple times throughout the script? An why are there so many unused lines of code, commented out? I think you should delete them completely to not confuse people. If you want do additional features people can use optionally, then either create options for that or create another script that can be run if its installed (check if file exists and then run it if user installed it).

These are just a few thoughts I had when looking into the code.

[–] boredsquirrel 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Nice thank you!

Yes the installer is kinda suboptimal, but the alternative is:

  • download the script
  • make it executable
  • execute it
  • delete it

So curl to bash is better and not dangerous as the script doesnt do dangerous things.

I think some script to do this better would be good. Maybe "curl to tempdir, then pipe that to bash"?

And yes the multipe seds, didnt know that (I find the sed syntax completely confusing).

What would happen if people comment out a single line?

sed -i \
# -e 's/abc/ABC/g' \
-e 's/def/DEF/g' \
user.js

If that works, this is likely a huge performance improvement.

The script needs to download the official user.js and yes there is the trust that this project never ships malicious content. That is the case with such a script.

The empty lines are to keep it sorted. I think it is a good way.

The commented out lines are for stuff that is experimental. I may remove them, but they likely work.

But moving to a different file is probably right.

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

curling into a temporary directory and then piping into Bash is effectively the same as the current way. Why not provide a clear instruction for installation and maybe even a separate installation script? Why does the setup script download the hardening script from the web, if its included in the repository anyway?

Here is how I would imagine the install instructions could look like. Git clone command will download all files from the current repo, including the hardening-overwrite script. With bash scriptname the user does not require to use chmod. I would remove the curl from the setup script. Also there is a dedicated install command in Linux.

Inside setup . sh you could use:

program='thunderbird-hardening-overwrite'
install -v "${program}" ~/.local/bin/"${program}"

And the installation instructions in the Readme could look like this:

git clone https://github.com/boredsquirrel/thunderbird-hardening-automation
bash setup.sh

If people are capable of copying the curl command, then they are capable of copying a few more lines like above.

Ah, I didn't think about the commenting out stuff. This breaks it. If that is something you want to allow, then this technique wouldn't work. There is a way to run sed only once, by building a command variable as a Bash array. I am using this technique in my scripts nowadays, but it might look strange for people who don't know about it. Commenting out lines is possible with arrays. Not sure if you would want do that. In case you want to look at how this looks:

# Base command.
sed_cmd=(
    sed
    -i
)

# Arguments that can be added by condition or excluded with commenting out.
sed_cmd+=(-e 's/abc/ABC/g')
sed_cmd+=(-e 's/def/DEF/g')

# Then the last argument that is intended to be added always.
sed_cmd+=(user.js)

# Execute the Bash array as a commandline:
"${sed_cmd[@]}"

This might look intimidating and I can understand if you pass on this one. But I just wanted bring this to your attention. You might want to experiment before committing to it.

[–] boredsquirrel 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Interesting, learning new things!

I did the "git clone and use only one file" stuff a lot and it sucks having all these files in the homedir.

I now use a subdir called "Git", and I would recommend that too. Or I would remove the other files, that are not needed.

The setup script can execute a lot of things, you should read it anyways. So yeah it may be a benefit to be sure that it is one git clone and then everything is local.

I was just annoyed about all the unneeded git repos in my home dir, so I started never using the actual git stuff, and always using wget or curl.

by building a command variable as a Bash array

Damn this is really good. I will use that and make quite a few scripts like 99% faster XD

Thanks!

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 1 points 5 months ago

Git clone is useful if you want actually keep the source code you downloaded originally. Also I assume people who use this command to get a program, would remove that directory manually after job is done (if they don't want to keep it). And I am always very careful with rm commands, therefore I do not include them most of the time. It's not like people would not know how to deal with temporary files they download, just like downloading an archive, unpacking it and removing the archive file as an analogy.

At least this is my way of doing so. I think this transparency is good for the end user, better than "hiding" it behind a curl into bash in my opinion (opinions vary I have noticed in the forums). You could put cd Downloads right before/above git clone command, to remind them its meant to be temporary. But I guess this does not align with the values and philosophy you follow, because you want to have it as simple and distraction free as possible for your user. That's why the curl into bash in the first place. It's just a priority thing what you value more.

[–] boredsquirrel 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Found a new issue, fail-safeness.

This is a set of changes that may not be needed anymore, if things change.

I tried it with a file, and it one of these commands fails, the whole command seems to fail.

So if a single setting is removed, this means the whole script would fail.

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I see. Indeed if this is the way you want to proceed, having individual commands is more appropriate. But the thing is, if something fails, then isn't it better to fail the entire script, instead proceeding silently without the fail being noticed? It depends, in some cases this can be the desired behavior.

[–] boredsquirrel 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Hm, kinda bad.

I could just add a GUI error message and get tons of bug reports, needing a fix.

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Hey, I'm not trying to convince you, just wanted to mention something more to think about. Sometimes fail-safeness is truly the better way. But is it in this case too? I mean if the script fails at once with a single sed command, then it means the file is not manipulated. If you have bunch of sed commands and one or two fails, then you have maybe 90% success commands and a few that did not work. That means the script edited the file in a state that was not intended to be. However, if it is a single command and fails all at once, at least the file is preserved as it is.

I don't know enough about this project to know whats important and appropriate in your case. I mean if its okay that commands "fail", then keep it this way.

[–] boredsquirrel 2 points 5 months ago

In this specific case it is not how this works.

It modifies lines searching for unique strings. If the string is not found, then it was maybe removed.

(The user.js handles removals normally by commenting things out, so I might actually use a single command).

If something was not found then it doesnt need to be changed, everything fine.

The result is a user.js from a good template, with all the settings applied that I knew. Maybe something new was added and that is unchanged.

The alternative would be not updating the config at all, which means no response to Mozilla adding weird stuff to it.

Firefox is a more moving target here.

I will implement a persistent GUI error message if something failed.