I feel like these headlines are designed to be way scarier than the scenarios actually are to people that don’t know much about Arch Linux.
true and part of me suspects that it’s intentional on the part of arch users so that they can continue to tell the world that they “use arch btw” lol
Is AUR more risky than before? Nope. But this targets more people than ever. StreamOS and CachyOS are pretty popular these days.
This is the most likely reason why all of sudden there is an uptick in attempt to embed malware in AUR build scripts.
I saw two pkgbuild from the user, I don’t really know what I’m looking at in pkgbuilds generally but these were dead obvious something was bogus . downloading arbitrary files from some url like (segs)(dot)(lol) hopefully sufficiently defanged
The malicious packages were found and removed quite quickly. Also anyone who doesn’t blindly install from the AUR would have seen a suspicious .lol url. I suppose that a genuine package using a .lol url isn’t impossible, it’s just very unlikely,
These attacks do demonstrate the strength and weakness of the AUR, that anyone can upload anything at any time. The same as flathub and the snap store. Treat all of them with appropriate caution.
Flatpak does have a concept of Verified Publisher. Many distros ship flatpak app store with default filter set to Verified Publisher only.
That sounds like a nice feature we could use for the Aur actually. We already have the
votesvalue, but some sort of verification body could help rescue the Aur’s reputation.
isnt that well known though? AUR packages are built by third parties (eg users) and there were always warnings against just this, no?
It is a well known risk but not something that was a real risk numerically. I mean, it still isn’t given the number of packages in the AUR.
This is a couple of malicious packages discovered in a short period though. Not a good sign. It was really impact the AUR if polluting it with malware became common.
You should always inspect AUR packages before installing them but few people do. Many would not even know what they were looking at.
yeah, that’s almost as bad as those apps requiring you to pipe a remote script through sudo shell
Me, a hacker, targeting anyone who says they use Arch btw.
This is why I just use the Chaotic AUR, knowing that something like this was being posted everywhere. My producer, Neigsendoig, does the exact same with his machine.
We both use CachyOS anyway.
