Transcript
Image of a man pointing a gun at his own foot.
Caption: Installing an AUR package without reading it’s PKGBUILD.
If you want a bunch of stuff that’s not in core or extra and you don’t want to intensely babysit the AUR, you could try Chaotic-AUR. It hosts prebuilt packages for a bunch of AUR packages which are actively maintained by the Chaotic team.
I consider it to be more secure than the AUR proper since they actually care for their packages and review nontrivial changes. For instance, the recent takeover attacks didn’t hit Chaotic-AUR builds since the changed packages didn’t make it past the review.
It’s still an unofficial third-party repository and closer to the AUR than to extra but I consider it a major step up.
Yes, but is it good, neutral, or evil?
It is colorful socks
it is arch
I mean how often do you install AUR packages? Usually takes like a minute or so to skim through PKGbuild and the pkg comments and look for obvious issues. And most updates are just a sha hash and version change, taking like 5s to check.
STABLE IS FOR HORSES I LOVE GAMBLING
/s
its
My dumb ass
What about your mute donkey?
I wrote “it’s” instead of “its” in the meme.
I realised…
I wasn’t going to do that.
And I was only using Artix for the AUR.
So I stopped using Artix.
Not responsible enough.
Responsible enough to stop.
without reading [it is] pkgbuild
I didn’t know it was.
If possible do it in a distrobox and down networking before running, yes that won’t stop the curl | sh in the install, but at least you can blow it away without hurting your main install and it will likely infect only the distrobox. Bonus points for an immutable main OS.
As the whole supply chain attack vector gets more sophisticated, and probably subtler in effect, these are going to be harder and harder to spot and likely start making it into main repos. Keep sharp people.
Not real fun for a linuxmemes post, but I think it needs saying.
Distrobox is not an isolated environment, it is quite the opposite. They say so themselves on their page:
Security implications
Isolation and sandboxing are not the main aims of the project, on the contrary it aims to tightly integrate the container with the host. The container will have complete access to your home, pen drive, and so on, so do not expect it to be highly sandboxed like a plain
docker/podmancontainer or a Flatpak.I would argue that Docker isn’t a good way to stop malware either, since it is highly vulnerable to sandbox escape leveraging the shared host-guest kernel, like the many of LPEs that have been found in the last few months (example using copy-fail).
Docker is not a secure sandbox, Podman is not a secure sandbox, Flatpak is not a secure sandbox. Use a VM, or better yet, don’t use the AUR.
Distrobox is not an isolated environment
True, you’ll note I didn’t say it is sandboxed or isolated, but it is a different environment. Paths that point to normal things like /usr etc. will be in the distrobox environment. That said, unless you use a custom home for the distrobox (you should anyway), your home directory is hosed. At this point I expect the malware to not be distrobox aware and use things like distrobox-host-exec, that may change.
A VM is absolutely a better approach, if significantly more frictional.
You don’t need to say the words “sandboxed” or “isolated” to say effectively the same thing. Your goal with distrobox was to keep the AUR malware separate from your normal system, no?
Security through obscurity is not security. The malware can do the same data exfiltration regardless of root access because the AUR malware has been about stealing secrets in user-readable directories. Setting a custom home for distrobox does not disallow access to the normal one.
Say for example that your default user home is /home/user and you set the distrobox home to /tmp/home
If you run
ls $HOMEinside distrobox it will list files in /tmp/home, but just as easily you could runls /home/$USERand it would list in your default home. Or alternatively just use the find command and steal secrets without targeting the user home.This is because changing the user home through distrobox doesn’t do anything about preventing directory traversal to your default home.
If your goal is to create a different environment and you don’t care that it won’t stop malware, use Incus or Podman directly. Distrobox is the wrong choice.
My point was simple: when dealing with malware, distrobox is not an effective method of creating a “different environment” because that is antithetical to its stated goals.
You can do whatever you want, I am not here to police your choice on your personal system. I only take issue with recommending this strategy to others.
If it’s endorsed by the project team I might as well. At that point it’s the same as downloading from GitHub and if I am in AUR I’ve probably not found it in standard repos nor flathub.
Someone put my WM on the AUR. I am thus proud to be authoring malware :)
All pointing with fingers to AUR, but the issue was (yet again) with NPM.
I usually do, but I don’t really know what I should be looking for. What are some red flags?
Check the list of dependencies. If you really want to vet the package, look through all of the dependencies listed and read their package descriptions on their source page (github, gitlab, codeberg, whathaveyou). Check also the URL, from which
makepkg(oryayor whatever) is going to pull some of the data. Is the URL legit?PKGBUILD of localsend
# Maintainer: NourEddineX # Contributor: Nixuge # Contributor: Noah Vogt <noah@noahvogt.com> # Contributor: SpieringsAE (aarch64 addition) # Note: # using the .deb instead of the .tar.gz as it already contains the icons as well as the .desktop file. pkgname=localsend-bin pkgver=1.18.0 pkgrel=1 pkgdesc='An open source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop' LOOK HERE url=https://github.com/localsend/LOCALSEND LOOK HERE arch=('x86_64' 'aarch64') license=(Apache-2.0) LOOK HERE depends=(fuse2 xdg-user-dirs libayatana-appindicator) LOOK HERE conflicts=('localsend') provides=('localsend') options=(!debug) source_x86_64=("${url}/releases/download/v${pkgver}/LocalSend-${pkgver}-linux-x86-64.deb") source_aarch64=("${url}/releases/download/v${pkgver}/LocalSend-${pkgver}-linux-arm-64.deb") sha256sums_x86_64=('dae68192ad43a59a68df06454eb5fa4e9a9f86a343fe430165efd8b18863d0f4') sha256sums_aarch64=('eb24e724fbdf830c8fb07dfc66b76b8a649923d083278305a63d5d539db4b606') _pkgdesktop="localsend_app.desktop" prepare() { tar -xf data.tar.zst } build() { sed -i -E \ "s|Exec=localsend_app|Exec=localsend|" \ "${srcdir}/usr/share/applications/${_pkgdesktop}" # Adjust .desktop to have it point to the correct icon sed -i -E 's/^Icon=.+/Icon=localsend/' "${srcdir}/usr/share/applications/${_pkgdesktop}" } package() { # Desktop install -Dm644 "${srcdir}/usr/share/applications/${_pkgdesktop}" "${pkgdir}/usr/share/applications/${pkgname%-*}.desktop" # Icons install -dm644 "${pkgdir}/usr/share/icons/" cp -a "${srcdir}/usr/share/icons" "${pkgdir}/usr/share" # Dirty - rename icons to localsend for res in "128x128" "256x256"; do mv "${pkgdir}/usr/share/icons/hicolor/${res}/apps/localsend_app.png" "${pkgdir}/usr/share/icons/hicolor/${res}/apps/localsend.png" done # Executable install -dm755 "${pkgdir}/opt/${pkgname%-*}/" cp -a "${srcdir}/opt/localsend_app/." "${pkgdir}/opt/${pkgname%-*}" # Same as icons - rename to localsend mv "${pkgdir}/opt/${pkgname%-*}/localsend_app" "${pkgdir}/opt/${pkgname%-*}/localsend" # Symlink executable install -dm755 "${pkgdir}/usr/bin" ln -s \ "/opt/${pkgname%-*}/${pkgname%-*}" \ "${pkgdir}/usr/bin/${pkgname%-*}" }
just use nix instead
we have super secure mechanisms in place to prevent supply chain attacks
/s (nix just hasn’t been targeted yet (as far as we know 💀💀))
Yeah, I just update all 20 flakes that I sourced from github and pray that none of them were hacked
just use nix instead
Maslow, is this your hammer?
/s (nix just hasn’t been targeted yet (as far as we know 💀💀))
Isn’t the real security through obscurity just being such a fringe market no one bothers? 🤔
I knew there was another reason I love Carbs Linux.
I once found a Rust program that streamlined the PKGBUILD reviewing process a lot by, first of all, giving you a really neat list of patterns and behaviours that would make a PKGBUILD suspicios or even plain dangerous, then having a scriptable rule-based engine that would either abort that operation, or show warns and workarounds to you.
I forgot its name, unfortunately, and I installed it on my previous installation (Garuda, now I’m on CachyOS).
Very dumb of my part not to try to write that down before the OS change lol.
pkgwatch maybe?
I’m running Arch daily since 2015, was on Debian before. I install and try a lot of stuff. Never had anything bad happened to me once. Worst case scenario the shit I just installed didn’t work so I have to debug it.
Not endorsing this apparently dangerous lifestyle, but also a little bit maybeI get why we need to do this but most people are not programmers either and probably don’t understand wtf they’re looking at.
While I understand some of what um looking at, when in just trying to get the updates over with its super annoying to review each aur pkgbuild.
You really don’t need to be a programmer to check for obvious bullshitery, you just need to read like four pages explaining what part means what there.
I disagree.
Picture… I dunno, a plumber. Hates computers but he knows to click the thing to update.
Now picture a different, more computer-curious plumber. He doesn’t hate computers, so he reads two pages on a wiki and now can at least spot when the url has changed or when the diff added some new step that wasn’t there before. You don’t need computer science degree to see that there is a new command that weren’t previously, and google that command.
Without reading its PKGBUILDfixed it for you. The AUR is toast, we have to say goodbye to it now.