Qt Widgets Designer Security Considerations

Qt Widgets Designer is a developer tool that treats its input as trusted and is not a security boundary.

When you use Qt Widgets Designer, be aware of the following risks:

  • Qt Widgets Designer loads plugins to provide custom widgets and extensions. The plugins are located in subdirectories named designer under the standard plugin directories. This can lead to arbitrary code execution on your machine.
  • .ui files loaded by Qt Widgets Designer might contain relative and absolute file system paths. As a result, Qt Widgets Designer could read arbitrary files, exposing confidential data.

We therefore recommend you only load .ui files and plugins you created yourself, or that come from sources you trust.

See also Using Qt's Developer Tools Securely.