Implement a policy-settings mechanism for approving/blocking extensions

[mike-myers-tob]

Hello! We (Trail of Bits Engineering Team) have been asked by one of our clients to contribute a feature to Visual Studio Code, and before we even begin we wanted to introduce ourselves and our plan and get feedback on (or approval for) our plan from the core maintainers of this repo. The proposed changes are to how the editor interfaces with the Extensions Marketplace, so it will only be useful if the changes can be upstreamed. In fact, we may need to coordinate with the VSCode open-source maintainers to even test builds that integrate the Extension Marketplace, present only in Microsoft builds of VSCode. We would appreciate your feedback on how/whether to proceed.

Feature Request

Enhance VSCode with the basic features for extension management:

• The ability to define an extension update policy
  • The policy would include a setting whether to allow side-loading of extensions (as VSIX files)
• With this policy, control whether VSCode can install, update, or load/run any given extension
  • Blacklist by extension ID
  • Whitelist by extension ID
• Pinning an extension to a particular version, allowing its continued use or the installation of that version, but preventing an update
• Prevent the use of extensions newer than some specified age (allowing for a “cooling off period” for new or untested extensions)

We plan to implement the extension management policy using an approach modeled on the extension management policy features in Google Chrome (and later by Mozilla, who based the extension management model of Firefox heavily on the one in Chrome), but without (at this time) its concept of a per-extension permissions model.

Deployment of the extension management policy to the managed systems would be handled out-of-band by the system's administrator, but it would be included within or referenced from the user's settings.json file. Right now we're not proposing to add any special controls to the settings editor UI of VSCode for editing this extension management policy. The policy will only be editable as JSON, as many other advanced features in VSCode are currently edited.

We acknowledge that, for the time being, this file is within control of the user. For now, we're going to ignore that (it is tracked in #27972)

Proposed UI changes

• Ensure that the VSCode extension UI elements presented to the user explain that an extension is blacklisted by their policy, and/or indicate such with a visual change. User should still be able to see blacklisted extensions in the marketplace, but just have their ability to install them blocked with a message (a configurable message also defined in the policy, with a clickable URL for more information and help), such as “this extension has been blocked by your policy; ask your admin.”
• Ensure that the VSCode extension marketplace UI indicates to the user when only certain versions of the extension are blocked. In this case, the installable version should be indicated, and a visual change in the UI should indicate the relevant release notes for that version.

Related Issues

• Feature Request: extension permissions, security sandboxing, and update management
• [Feature Request] - Extension Dating & Timestamps of last updates. #70736

Client sponsor

Our client, who has agreed to participate in this discussion, is @zabicki-stripe

[sandy081]

Appreciated for the detailed description of your requirement. To start with, one of the requested features is already supported. Pinning an extension to a particular version, allowing its continued use or the installation of that version, but preventing an update. User can pin to a specific version of an extension. Some of the features are not common and not frequently asked like disabling side loading, cooling off period.

I would say overall it is a big feature and generally not considered for external contribution. But if you are super keen on this, you can think of going with one by one.

[zabicki-stripe]

Hi Sandeep, Thank you for that context. It's quite helpful. If we split this into three contributions (allowlist, denylist, and cooling off period) do you think that these features would be approved? Thanks, Roman

…

On Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 4:17 AM Sandeep Somavarapu ***@***.***> wrote: Appreciated for the detailed description of your requirement. To start with, one of the requested features is already supported. Pinning an extension to a particular version, allowing its continued use or the installation of that version, but preventing an update. User can pin to a specific version of an extension. Some of the features are not common and not frequently asked like disabling side loading, cooling off period. I would say overall it is a big feature and generally not considered for external contribution. But if you are super keen on this, you can think of going with one by one. — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#84756?email_source=notifications&email_token=AL6TDYMM4D2TVNYGCUXTVO3QUJTRXA5CNFSM4JNEKII2YY3PNVWWK3TUL52HS4DFVREXG43VMVBW63LNMVXHJKTDN5WW2ZLOORPWSZGOEEJ5SLQ#issuecomment-554948910>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AL6TDYK2CXLUSGI3BW2JPODQUJTRXANCNFSM4JNEKIIQ> .

[sandy081]

Depends on how complex each feature is going to be. But PRs are always welcome.

[mike-myers-tob]

@sandy081 what would you recommend we do in order to ensure that our contribution is accepted and merged in due time? I see there are many PRs going back several years, so some PRs are not welcome. We just want to know if these are specifically features that would be merged, if we completed a PR.

[sandy081]

You can start with

The policy would include a setting whether to allow side-loading of extensions (as VSIX files)

[vscodebot]

This feature request is now a candidate for our backlog. The community has 60 days to upvote the issue. If it receives 20 upvotes we will move it to our backlog. If not, we will close it. To learn more about how we handle feature requests, please see our documentation.

Happy Coding!

[vscodebot]

🙂 This feature request received a sufficient number of community upvotes and we moved it to our backlog. To learn more about how we handle feature requests, please see our documentation.

Happy Coding!