Tumbler privacy issues

[Matiss Treinis]

By default Tumbler is not limited to user's home directory nor there is expiry mechanism for thumbnails to expire automatically. Tumbler also saves all the thumbnails from removable drives by default.

This functionality should be addressed as a security and privacy concern, because by evaluating contents of the .thumbnails one is able to get an idea on what's is and have been stored on the computer, and even remote media.

[Seth Arnold (seth-arnold)]

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We appreciate the difficulties you are facing, but this appears to be a "regular" (non-security) bug. I have unmarked it as a security issue since this bug does not show evidence of allowing attackers to cross privilege boundaries nor directly cause loss of data/privacy. Please feel free to report any other bugs you may find.

[Seth Arnold (seth-arnold)]

Note that if you want tumbler, or any other program, to have fewer privileges, you can always prepare an AppArmor profile to allow only the accesses you want.

I suspect if we were to distribute a profile as restrictive as you would wish, it would break features that other people rely upon.

Thanks

[Matiss Treinis (mrtreinis)]

Thank you for reviewing this issue, Seth!

I believe that AppArmor profile would not solve this issue, only changing Tumbler default behavior would, for example, to have thumbnails expire after certain time.

This might not be a issue for every-day users storing family photos, however we use Ubuntu in our corporate environment, and upon reviewing our desktops we found that Tumblr has stored thumbnails for files from removable drives, some in quite large resolutions and on close inspection they could let attacker imply and deduce things, even after they are wiped from drives or not even present on the computer itself. This is why I believe this default functionality is partially flawed, because a non-expert user would never know that such cache of thumbnails exists.

[Thaddaeus Tintenfisch (thad-fisch-deactivatedaccount)]

Please forward this issue upstream by filing a report on the Xfce bug tracker. Thanks in advance.

https://bugzilla.xfce.org