Transcript
Image of a man pointing a gun at his own foot.
Caption: Installing an AUR package without reading it’s PKGBUILD.
STABLE IS FOR HORSES I LOVE GAMBLING
/s
Well earned upvote, sir/ma’am.
I wish I could give you a second upvote, that’s hilarious 😂
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
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.
But wasn’t the latest AUR attack from a dependancy in the pkgbuild? Going out of your way to review all the dependencies as well is not really possible by just skimming through the script.
I need a better wrapper that shows me diffs since last build. I’m too lazy for this
Also pulling in release messages from git etc would be nice
paru
its
My dumb ass
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.
Nah, if you really want to live on the bleeding edge you gotta make blindly installing vibecoded junk from shady parts of the AUR part of your workflow
I was contemplating moving to NixOS, but then another fiasco just happened, masse me question what would one have to lose by switching to Qubes instead, considering the increasingly surveiling internet.
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.
I usually do, but I don’t really know what I should be looking for. What are some red flags?
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.
Would Firejail fall for the same/similar sandbox vulnerabilities that Docker containers do?
I use Arch without touching this AUR in my latest install. Just use what’s in the main package repos or flathub
Update your desktop only all one or two weeks, get basic protection (adblocker, hosts file), read the news.
It’s a peaceful life.
I just don’t understand the process of I don’t have two minutes to read what I’m installing. It’s fucking batshit crazy that all these retards want to come use Linux which is fine but then when they get solid advice they tell us they can’t be bothered.
Yeah, when something isn’t in the official repos, NixOS exists, Flatpak exists, and they’re all vetted.
Wanting a super clean system where everything is managed by pacman is purely about taste, so if you want it, you clearly can be bothered to put in the 2 minutes of work.
