Having a vuln that many other terminal emulators have had is pretty different from the string of unique and extremely bad vulns that iTerm has had over the years. It’s possible that we’ll see similar from Ghostty, but it’s a much newer and I believe smaller codebase, so I’m willing to give it a second chance.

I've been using iTerm daily for something like a decade at this point and I'm struggling to think of any examples of this string of extremely bad vulns. There's this one, which is specific to SSH integration. There was CVE-2024-38396, which is the window title escape sequences I was talking about above.

What others am I missing?

How about making DNS requests for everything you hover over to determine if it’s a URL? https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/iterm2-leaks-...

Yeah, that was the moment everyone should have immediately stopped using this piece of software, and it should have been tarred with such an inescapable stigma that we would not be talking about it today.

Wounded the pride of iTerm2 fans wielding downvotes, I see. It's fine. You maybe didn't even know about this bit of history. It was a long time ago, and the internet has a short memory.

No, it's just that you're exceptionally rude.

Probably true, but it still stings that this dubious piece of software (speaking as a former iTerm2 user still holding a grudge) had been spraying my passwords and random terminal activity all over the internet in the form of unencrypted DNS requests for who knows how long, deliberately, due to mindless opt-out featuritis on the part of the developer. In my mind this is one of the clearest violations of privacy and information security I've been directly subjected to, because the developer had some gee-whiz-neato idea of highlighting URLs in a terminal and making them clickable.

It pains me to think people are still exposing themselves to this class of risk because of whatever iTerm2's latest and greatest idea is.

I think it's very reasonable to point at the development model and go, "I think this is bad and specifically the cause for security vulnerabilities". If you want to make that your position (I am sure it is already, and I don't think it is particularly controversial) that is completely fine. But there's a difference between holding that and your actual comment. Like, this was 100% unintentional, and people literally introduce malicious or undesirable features in their software all the time. Maybe we should save the tarring and feathering for that, and come up with a more measured take for stuff like this?

A vuln every 7-8 years is "a string of unique and extremely bad vulns"?

I use iTerm2, mostly because that's what I'm used to: I installed it on my first Mac years ago when Terminal.app was really bad. I'm willing to switch to another terminal, but I don't see yet how iTerm2 is so much worse than the competition security-wise.

(I also don't understand the general animosity towards an opensource project with one developer doing all the work for 15 years.)

> A vuln every 7-8 years is "a string of unique and extremely bad vulns"?

Here’s another: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/iterm2-patche...

And another: https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2019-19022/

Point being: it’s not hard to see what I’m talking about if you look up previous vulnerabilities in iTerm2, particularly around its sophisticated integration features. (I suppose I talk about this enough that it might be worth compiling all the history I’m aware of somewhere, I don’t want to sound like I’m just making this up)

It’s also notable that iTerm was found vulnerable to the same bug discovered recently in Ghostty: https://threatintelligencelab.com/blog/cve-2024-38396-a-crit...

> I also don't understand the general animosity towards an opensource project with one developer doing all the work for 15 years

I have nothing against George Nachman and iTerm2 is certainly an achievement, one that I probably couldn’t replicate myself. Nonetheless I feel the need to hold my terminal emulator to higher standards because it processes sensitive data and untrusted input with (inherently) poor isolation between the two. Until Ghostty I used Terminal.app for many years, having previously switched away from iTerm2 after the vulnerability discovered in 2017. That’s still what I recommend to people because it has a much smaller feature set and thus attack surface compared to iTerm.

I hope I didn´t sound like I did not believe you, I honestly had no idea. I don´t get an update for iTerm2 every week so I figured it was mostly stable / had no sec issue.

Following this discussion I decided to give Ghostty and kitty a try. I kept Ghostty, mainly because the shortcuts I use the most in iTerm2 are there and I like the default theme (yes, I'm a simple person.) It has less features / integrations I don´t use anyway so I guess the attack surface is smaller.

I can only find three CVEs prior to this. It's only one of those that I would qualify as "extremely bad" (the DNS query leak you mention below). The others are the window title bug GP mentions and the undocumented maintenance of a plain text search history file.

Ghostty has also been out for what, a week? So this is the open season / shakedown, when security researchers get to try out all the old favorites and see what got missed.

I don't think there are larger lessons to draw from that occurrence. A reputation for security has to be earned, and Ghostty hasn't been around long enough for that. From my vantage point it's on track, but only time will tell.

I'm not trying to knock either Ghostty in particular or new software in general. But the kind of "open season" phase you're referring to is basically the same point I'm making: new software still has to go through the phase where they work through their security model, have it probed by researchers, and earn their reputation.