I wish I had a clear operating system to switch to for safety and the benefits that come with the AUR or the Nix ecosystem. Unfortunately it seems that the era of being able to naively and gratefully trust in the armies of volunteer maintainers is over.
LLMs make large scale and long-term attacks easy and cheap. You could (and if I was a three letter agency, I would probably do so!) maintain ten thousand packages as three thousand separate "individuals" for years before cashing in the trust you've built up.
I'm almost scared to ask, did you not even review the PKGBUILD or anything else before installing stuff from the AUR?
Nixpkgs has a completed different model compared to AUR, the changes that end up in nixpkgs are all reviewed by maintainers, while AUR is literally free-for-all "anyone can push anything at any time", I don't think you ever could "naively and gratefully trust" AUR in the way you might have been.
I'd venture most people actually don't review pkgbuild; especially on upgrades.
The other issue of course is that, the devils in the details. Fetch a binary as part of the installation (or, just fetch a binary itself, no compilation) then you're boned.
You can even hide nefarious code in the compilation/build steps, Jia Tan style.
-pkgver=1.7.2
+pkgver=1.7.3
-sha256sums=('aaaaaaaaaa')
+sha256sums=('bbbbbbbbbb')
Humans are short sighted, want to solve the situation immediately and will do the laziest thing possible to accomplish a given task.
Babashka has this for example (https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=babas...):
pkgname=babashka-bin
pkgver=1.13.219
url='https://github.com/borkdude/babashka'
source_x86_64=("${pkgname}-${pkgver}-linux-amd64-static.tar.gz::${url}/releases/download/v${pkgver}/${pkgname%-bin}-${pkgver}-linux-amd64-static.tar.gz")
Most updates are just bumping the upstream software version and its checksum, as GP describes, and yes arguably you should be reviewing the change to that software too, but that's a separate threat. And it may be a proprietary binary, in which case on update you've already decided to trust the third-party, so the diff shows you that nothing has changed in that regard, the trusted party simply released a new opaque version.
No, I'm sorry but who on earth installs random software from random strangers, without a single step of validating before giving it access to (presumably) the same computer you do banking on?
> The other issue of course is that, the devils in the details. Fetch a binary as part of the installation (or, just fetch a binary itself, no compilation) then you're boned.
Sure, that's why when you review the PKGBUILD, and instead of it using the official GitHub organization / domain (which you of course validate) for downloading the binary/source, you don't install it.
I agree it's still vulnerable to Jia Tan style attacks, but installing from AUR is essentially "curl http://random-website.com/script.sh | bash", and reviewing a PKGBUILD takes a few seconds, and stop/cancel if something is sus, it's really that easy.
Realistically most users?
It's already quite a technical barrier to run Arch Linux, and the knowledge to further know about/understand PKGBUILD can only comes with time and is yet another layer filtering people's ability to know how to even try to catch something malicious.
Now consider the layer of even experienced user that's in a bit of rush and doesn't have time to review the full diffs they're upgrading to.
Ralistically it's nearly statistically impossible that 100% of users would be able to all catch and block a given exploit themselves. A shared responsibility model of security [1] comes to mind, and while it's great for users to be active participants in their security, their action/awareness should be a last resort. I wouldn't blame the user.
[1] https://docs.cloud.google.com/architecture/framework/securit...
Again, why are people expecting that you need to review the entire thing? You don't have to, you have to look at the download source (a github organization or a domain name or a cdn bucket) and look at what dependencies/other junk it pulls in. Usually this is 3-5 lines at max, and usually only the binary/source is taken from github/server, the rest is from official Arch repositories.
Of course it's unrealistic to expect users to review 100% of the code they run on their machine, that's why no one is expecting this, nor claiming that users should do this. But reviewing 3-5 lines when installing software from literal strangers on the internet, isn't so much to ask.
People are supposed to clear that barrier by studying the Arch Wiki and other technical materials so that they understand what they are doing, why they are doing it, and the risks involved.
When they install random software pushed by random people they know nothing about much less trust without even so much as a glance at the PKGBUILD, they're not overcoming any barriers, they're YOLOing their personal computers and hoping it turns out fine.
> I wouldn't blame the user.
I would. They were warned.
Everyone. People who don't tend to build from source and the convenience of package managers has outweighed this for most people for years now. Even if you review the code do you review every library it pulls in? Because I have to tell you I don't believe you, and if most people did do that then these supply chain attacks would be minor news.
True, but I'd reverse the order. It's npm, pip, cargo, gem and all the others that are like the AUR. They're every bit as dangerous as the AUR, yet the AUR is the only one that singles itself out by warning people of the danger.
Anyone can sign up and push packages. I've literally done that myself, even though nobody in the Arch Linux community knows or trusts me. AUR is the only one where users are repeatedly made aware of this danger. All the others normalize and encourage importing random unvetted dependencies for the sake of developer convenience.
Folks podman is good. Very, very good. You want good developer ergonomics? Use dev containers. The cost of pulling npm packages Willy nilly on the host is not worth it!
Potential malware will share a kernel with the host. One exploit and we're owned. Virtual machines are the better solution. Infinitely smaller attack surface. If they crack hardware hypervisors, it means the entire industry is in deep shit, not just us.
I went so far as to code up my own development virtual machine orchestration software. Now I'm making a custom Rust network stack for it.
In my case I'm guilty of not checking brew updates (even from casks) on Mac, but I'm also guilty of only updating them every couple of months so it probably balances out.
I would assume essentially everyone? `curl https://random-website.com/script.sh | sh` is one of the most common way of installing software outside of perhaps Flatpak. AppImage is essentially the same as piping a script from the internet into bash.
> reviewing a PKGBUILD takes a few seconds
This assumes a naive attack that is easily visible from the PKGBUILD. Unless the attacker makes no effort to hide their activity, the PKGBUILD will look perfectly ordinary while still installing malware.
Sure wish GitHub READMEs hadn't normalized this.
Changes to some of that might be easy to catch, but if the PKGBUILD depends on external resources, it can be quite hard to audit. I am not saying this is good practice, but you can see these sort of things happen all the time on the AUR.
If the PKGBUILD depends on more stuff then just officially available things, don't blindly install it and wish for the best. Just like if you "curl | bash" install something, you do at least look at the URL right? It takes a couple of seconds, maybe tens of seconds if you don't recognize the domain/github organization since before.
I'll stand by that I think most Arch Linux users, extrapolated from the people I know also run it, review at least the domain/GitHub organization for random AUR packages, and all of them are aware of what the AUR actually is, and is for.
I don't think most people here on HN who are clearly misunderstanding what the AUR is, are actually Arch users, or if they are, they haven't read the header that been visible since forever on the AUR.
You're supposed to review every single one of those too.
Well, for one almost everyone on Windows. That’s changing with winget and such but the standard Linux method is still an anomaly in desktop computing as a whole.
I know it's hard to believe, but many users, even Windows ones, actually check if they're on the right website/in the right GitHub organization, before downloading binaries.
That would be every day that I run apt-get, pkg add, brew install, or download a random .exe/.dmg to update my machine.
A decade of telling people that if they don't update constantly they're at risk, also affects us computer people.
Being able (and willing) to inspect source tree is the exception here, not the standard.
Everything except that last part, are not "random strangers on the internet", those are maintainers who maintain the registry/repository you've chosen to use. And when you use those, they use "mirrors" hosted on their own infrastructure.
AUR is a very different thing from this, where essentially anyone, at any time, can become a "mirror" and host whatever code they want, with zero review.
I obviously don't review stuff when I use pacman and official Arch package repositories, because again, those aren't "Wild west of random binaries", like the AUR.
It’s all strangers stuff
The latter might be a problem caused by hosting it on the archlinux.org domain: it creates a *feeling* of trust, for the uninitiated.
Yup, 100%. Probably I've spent way too long time trying to make people (in the various AUR submissions here on HN) realize that the AUR probably isn't what they think it is, as most replies/comments about the AUR seems misinformed about what it is for and how it works.
I've learned not to trust the AUR because the barrier to malice is lower, but I run system updates every other day.
No one. Who codes their own operating systems before they launch a calculator on their own computer? No one as well. Why the irrelevant questions? They're all very different things.
You literally have to review one line, that points to a remote URL somewhere, that's it. If it's wrong/sus, don't install it, you don't even have to review more than that.
Me. It's even easier now with AI.
Only difference is now I ask AI models to read it too. Chances of malware slipping by both myself and AI is lower than it slipping by either in isolation.
They review the “recipes”, sure. But I don’t know if I’d trust that every diff of the source of every package update is reviewed by them.
Can't have it both ways.
Your packages can come from a small number of trusted individuals who maintain the software distribution. Naturally, this limits your choices to the packages they personally maintain. If you need something outside of that set, you need to ask them to include it or source it yourself.
Alternatively, your packages can come from a software repository that allows internet randoms to push literally anything. That expands your selection to all software ever created, which includes malware since nobody's doing the work to filter that stuff out.
Arch Linux offers both paradigms. Make an informed decision.
The maintainers you're supposed to trust are Arch Linux's actual staff made up of package maintainers, formerly known as trusted users.
AUR packages are maintained by randoms on the internet. Anyone can sign up and push a package.
Arch Linux disables AUR package adoption (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49123208)
Once your project obtains any sort of real notoriety, it starts having a blast radius, and you need to have at least some idea of who is pushing what to it when and why. The Linux kernel has a pretty good system of this for the time being with Linus being BDFL. There's governance, there's a standard, and most importantly, there are resources coming in.
If your wares are being used by large groups of people you've never met and in ways you cannot possibly imagine, then it's time to start doing the boring paperwork and political parts of managing the community around it, not just pushing commits and adding features.