Developers debate threat model and real-world applicability
2 Yesterday 6:55 PM · 14h ago · 11 comments · 1 source · development 2 of 2
Hacker News commenters divided on severity: some argued VSCode's capabilities are intentional and appropriate for remote dev environments if properly isolated; others raised concerns about reverse code execution from compromised remotes and memory overhead.
“The issue the article highlights is this opens you to local code execution initiated by the remote.”
Rapzid, HN commenter · hn ↗Fly.io Cloud platform operator
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What people said 19 voices · verbatim
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> The agent runs over port-forwarded SSH. It establishes a WebSockets connection back to your running VSCode front-end. The underlying protocol on that connection can: Wander around the filesystem Edit arbitrary files Launch its own shell PTY processes Persist itself Wait, could someone clarify which machine is being referred to here?So in the…
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Allow me to translate this for the vibe bros. The "agent" here is not an LLM agent, it's the SSH agent that connects the VSCode front-end to the remote back-end.The issue the article highlights is this opens you to local code execution initiated by the remote.Here is the security notice on the official SSH extension…
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I have been using VSCodium (chromium-like version of VSCode) with this extension:https://github.com/jeanp413/open-remote-sshI run the editor (and its extensions), my projects and any agent harnesses from inside a container and use that extension to get an editor.This is mostly to protect my credentials and data from malicious…
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As a Linux user I've hated VSCode's ssh. There's lot of annoying things that make it harder to admin for. Like it doesn't pick up the MotD, preventing me from showing users important messages. I've found that it also doesn't reuse sessions (at least by default. TBF, neither does ssh) and I'll find that there's just dozens of open sessions over…
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2026-09-24 09:35:24 dev ~ du -h -d 0 .vscode-server 6.0G .vscode-server This is what makes it bananas for me. I don't know what Microsoft is thinking if they allow this. 2026-09-24 09:35:29 dev ~ python3 python/stuff/cleanup-vscode.py === cli/servers === KEEP Stable-a5b500951314efd502d07465bd138dfbd714a960 678.2 MB === bin === KEEP…
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So a program that is specifically designed to edit files and run arbitrary commands on a remote machine... can do so. Not sure where the bananas part comes in. Sending a binary over SSH/SFTP might sound weird at first glance, but VSCode can't assume that your remote machine can access the wider internet, and it needs a reliable way to bootstrap…
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The agent is supposed to run on a remote dev box. The purpose is to make the remote machine an extension of your local one, to run extensions, containers, install packages, test deployments, forward ports and tons more. Tunneling is part of the feature set. If you are installing it on production servers and are surprised by its behavior that’s on…
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The author didn't go into much explanation behind "I would be a little nervous about letting people VSCode-remote-edit stuff on dev servers".If you are worried about having VSCode server-side binaries running directly on the bare metal OS you can isolate the workspace using containers or VMs.
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I’ve been using it daily since it came out. At first it was because I was tired of docker slowing my Mac down with some really heavy client projects. But now I use it as an easier ssh client w/ file editing. I really don’t like using vim/nano. Keeping everything in the same ide, huge for me.
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> ”hallucination” is what we call it when LLMs get code wrong; “engineering” is what we call it when people do.They've lost me right there at the top of the article. This sounds like a pure hatred and ignorance to what the actual software engineering is.
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Yeah this is the right architecture for remote editing with remote tools. It works really well. (There are longstanding bugs around reconnection when the SSH connection is broken but that's not the fault of the architecture.)
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I'm also on the verge to decide if to ban those vscode reverse shells in my servers. devs will cry for sure. Local claude cli instances are OK, I think, but remote is a huge risk.
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Nothing has changed as far as the insecurity the article has outlined.The problem is the remote host has control over local host through the protocol.
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It's unusable on low end 512MB RAM VPS servers because someone decided bundling whole node runtime for file operations is a good idea.
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> You can restrict SSH access arbitrarily to ensure whatever security or access guardrails you need.How, specifically for VSCode?
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I like VSCode server in general, but it's too memory hungry. It would crash Raspberry Pi (1GB) by eating up all the RAM.
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i got tired of vscode always complaining about sth. I am liking neovim and Jetbrains IDEs, these never gave me any headache.
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Why not sshfs? Been using that for ages, since before VSCode existed. Is it suddenly broken?
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I wonder if the same reverse code execution risk applies to the VSCodium extensions
All 2 developments of Fly.io details VSCode SSH agent architecture, security… →
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