AUR Packages Compromised with Infostealer and Rootkit

123

kkeyle about 8 hours ago 62 commentsRead Article on discourse.ifin.network

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Discussion (62 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

harvie•23 minutes ago

7+ hours into this and still no mention on archlinux.org webpage nor on aur.archlinux.org. Why??? AUR should have been blocked until user takes action to prove he knows about this.

Eg. change AUR API URL slightly so yay/yaourt users need to look up what is going on. New API should have infrastructure for informing users and making sure they've read the message before proceeding. Especially when they're not even sure that all malware was found.

hootz•3 minutes ago

There are some AUR hooks that can help. I use https://github.com/Sohimaster/traur which also has scans for orphan package takeover patterns.

xx_ns•about 2 hours ago

This campaign is still ongoing. I just got an email that one of my old packages (which hasn't worked for years and was orphaned for a while) was adopted and immediately a malicious commit was pushed. They seem to be using bun instead of npm now, so any npm-based workaround likely isn't effective.

https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/commit/?h=toggldeskto...

spystath•about 2 hours ago

Obviously installing anything from AUR must be done cautiously and there have always been sketchy (as in improperly built/packaged) packages in the past but seeing actively malicious injections is concerning. I think there are two main problems with AUR: 1. it is a remnant of a slightly more egalitarian era in the open source history when you could generally trust 3rd party code and 2. orphaned packages can be adopted by anyone with their full history and vetting intact.

I think we are well past (1) but (2) could be mitigated by tighter controls on AUR accounts and potentially additional safeguards from AUR helpers. Maybe show a big scary warning if the package has changed owners recently. I know there will still be people that will "y" their way forward but it's better than nothing.

Or just avoid AUR helpers altogether and inspect/build the packages you need yourself from their PKGBUILDs directly.

jeremyjh•about 2 hours ago

There was never an era in which #2 was a reasonable policy.

akdev1l•about 1 hour ago

The canonical answer to any concerns with the AUR is always “just read the PKGBUILDs bro”

hootz•6 minutes ago

For every single update, for all your AUR packages, all the time.

You know that thing where if you make a security review feature obnoxious, after some time people will just accept everything without even looking? Yeah...

williebeek•about 1 hour ago

I remember installing an emulator (Mednafen) on Arch Linux about a decade ago. The program failed to run because it was linked against a library my system didn't have. Turns out, the maintainer built the software on his own system and it used a library he had on his system but was not listed in the dependencies.

It is an officially maintained package and I always assumed these were built on a dedicated build server instead of some a random volunteer/home computer. Don't know if Arch still builds the same way but this event scared me enough to switch distros.

rcxdude•22 minutes ago

It's only relatively recently that this has shifted from the norm. Debian operated this way for a long time and it was only in 2019 that they forbade it entirely.

UI_at_80x24•about 4 hours ago

Here's an easy script to scan for compromised packages:

https://cscs.pastes.sh/aurvulntest20260611.sh

Not my script. It's easy to read/parse. Never pipe a script directly to bash.

sph•about 3 hours ago

A quicker alternative:

  comm -1 -2 <(pacman -Qq | sort) <(curl -s https://gist.githubusercontent.com/quantenProjects/3f768dce7331618310f016d975bf8547/raw/beef579f8a8efeed6ccf60788e5b768775550095/packages | sort)

It's never a bad time to learn about comm(1).

sva_•about 3 hours ago

It isn't guaranteed that the list is conclusive.

Always check PKGBUILD and sources, AUR is not to be trusted for the most part. I'm actually more surprised that such compromise hasn't happened earlier.

dathinab•about 1 hour ago

> hasn't happened earlier.

it happens all the time

Just not always on this scale and doesn't always end up on HN.

Similar to how you don't see every npm supply chain attack or malicious github action or similar on HN.

In general you _have to_ manually review every PKGBUILD update by hand (by diff). Everything else is neglect IMHO. Luckily for most packages this is reasonably doable, IFF you trust the upstream sources they fetch from. (As in: Most packages are a small amount of glue between pacman and a upstream source.)

As consequence AUR packages with AUR dependencies are in general "uh..., lets not do it" cases for me, as on one hand the review overhead can be a pain and on the other hand it's easy to make a mistake overlooking a change in AUR dependencies.

Still the policy which allows relatively easy adoption of orphaned packages is IMHO a problem. A adoption should be treated as a new package which just happen to have the same name. (It can be fine to not have that if arch maintainers "bless" the adoption, but IMHO that would only matter for a view very widely used packages which are candidates to be included in the official repo but aren't for e.g. license reasons.)

porridgeraisin•11 minutes ago

I have opencode review it for me. Works great. With the opencode-pty plugin it operates a terminal like a human would, runs yay, opens the pkgbuild in vim when yay asks it, reviews, etc etc. gives an `n` at the end cancelling the operation and gives me a report. I read that and then upgrade. For non-famous 3-4 aur packages I have, I have it read the code itself. It's enough to catch the non-jia-tan problems.

datakan•about 2 hours ago

> I'm actually more surprised that such compromise hasn't happened earlier.

This is like the 3rd or 4th time. It's been ongoing and persistent for the last 2 years with frequent AUR downtime as a result.

The AUR should be deprecated in its current state, simply can't be trusted and is a blemish on an otherwise great distro.

matheusmoreira•about 3 hours ago

The Arch Wiki does note that malware has made it into the AUR several times before.

jeroenhd•about 1 hour ago

Note that pacman supports date locales; searching for '9 Jun' only works in English locales (or locales using similar formatting, I suppose).

After correcting, for me, it flagged "jd-gui", but I had actually installed "jd-gui-bin" about two hours before the compromise. As far as I can tell, I was lucky that I felt lazy that night and went for the -bin package instead of waiting for the source to be compiled.

zache6•about 1 hour ago

Same situation for me. "alvr-bin" instead of "alvr". I'm a week out of date too.

yaakushi•27 minutes ago

Not the first time this has happened recently. There were a few emails in the AUR list a few weeks ago about malicious packages, and a few reports on IRC too. The only difference in the campaign back then was the malicious npm package name (`linux-utils` in the campaign a few weeks ago).

bachmeier•35 minutes ago

So what's a solution to this? Install packages like this in Docker containers without network access? I don't think we should assume it's limited to AUR. Every software source should be considered suspect in 2026, particularly with the adoption of vibe coding, and closed software is a bigger mess than open source because it's a black box.

secret-noun•about 2 hours ago

Here's a commit showing how they did it: https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/commit/?h=pass-cli&id...

Internet archive URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20260611213640/https://aur.archl...

Retr0id•about 3 hours ago

I haven't used Arch for a few years now, but when I did the AUR was my favourite aspect.

It was never perfect from a security PoV, but in 2026 this kind of trust model feels increasingly scary.

goodpoint•about 1 hour ago

We are pretty far from "never perfect"

nialv7•about 3 hours ago

third time this has happened:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17501379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44607740

lordleft•about 3 hours ago

This is especially gnarly as more people have been picking up arch distros as of late (like CachyOS).

nickjj•about 1 hour ago

On the bright side you can get quite far without the AUR.

I have 1,135 packages installed. Only 3 top level packages are from the AUR and 2 of those 3 are from the same author, they just happened to split their packages into a client / server architecture.

simoncion•19 minutes ago

This is similar to my situation with Gentoo. Across my Gentoo systems, I have exactly one package installed from an "overlay" [0], and that's Steam. Everything else is straight out of the official package tree.

[0] ...which is -IIRC- Gentoo's term for a user-provided and entirely-unvetted collection of packages...

scary-size•about 3 hours ago

Installed CachyOS to replace my Win 10 installation a month ago. Not looking back! But yeah this sucks, I've mostly used Ubuntu with apt in the past. Pacman and makepkg felt a bit weird to use in the beginning.

dtag00•30 minutes ago

Is there a way to verify if the malware is actually installed on a machine?

keyle•about 3 hours ago

More news is coming out about this:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arch-Linux-AUR-400-Compromised

I toyed with the idea that someone should write a binary that simply emails, or alert you when it's been run... as a canary... and call that `npm`.

At this point, not renaming the npm binary is a big risk.

Artoooooor•about 1 hour ago

Thanks for the link. It contains link to list of the affected packages, that will be useful.

sph•about 3 hours ago

Be aware of false positives! I found I had two of these packages installed, clang19 and compiler-rt19, but due to my recent laziness in updating my system, mine were still the versions from July 2025 from the official repos before they had relegated them to AUR.

You can check the build and install date with `pacman -Qi <package>`.

I run Arch Linux in a container (within Fedora Silverblue), but my plan for the future:

- consider switching away from Arch Linux for my dev container, with great sadness. A rolling distro is a terrible idea in the current security climate. I loved using Arch for my dev container exactly because of AUR.

- switch to Fedora Stable, perhaps the previous release which still gets security fixes but no other updates. I am still on Fedora 43, I guess I have no rush to update to 44. - be even lazier in updating my workstation. I used to update daily when I was running Arch, then I moved to weekly last year when I got stuck with slow internet, now consider updating monthly or more (of course, unless there are critical security bugs)

- Flatpak and Flathub terrify me, it's only a matter of time until malware appears. I have had automatic upgrades disabled for a while.

- for the love of God don't touch anything that uses npm

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48458931

reedlaw•about 2 hours ago

I also had an affected package installed, fortunately it was from the official repo before it was dropped and became an AUR package.

doubled112•about 2 hours ago

> Flatpak and Flathub terrify me

I thought Flathub has a review and approval process. Does it fall short in some fundamental way?

Any review process is more than the AUR and NPM are doing.

akdev1l•about 1 hour ago

Flathub only reviews the manifest.

If your manifest is covertly injecting malware into the build it could be easily missed. Consider some of the manifests are simply downloading deb packages and unzipping them.

QuantumNoodle•about 3 hours ago

Man, I never hear good security things about npm

Retr0id•about 3 hours ago

This doesn't really have anything to do with npm.

vitamark•about 2 hours ago

anything except that it's malware installed via npm

notabotiswear•about 2 hours ago

From the Arch mailing list [0]

>The result is a rather long list of ~408 packages all doing npm install atomic-lockfile something something

[0] https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/aur-general@lists....

Retr0id•about 2 hours ago

They could've pip installed, curl|sh'd or anything else, it's not relevant to the underlying issue.

animitronix•about 2 hours ago

So true. The JavaScript ecosystem is trash.

self_awareness•about 2 hours ago

How a person 'adopts' 408 packages and controls their build scripts?

StrLght•about 1 hour ago

Orphaned packages, so other people are able to file requests and take over them. That's how AUR works — it's community-driven [0].

[0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_User_Repository

Technetium•about 2 hours ago

They were orphaned, so anyone could adopt them. There are 15k other orphans at the moment.

animitronix•about 2 hours ago

Wow, this is effectively the end of the AUR model. There's been a malicious package or two before, but an attack this widespread shows things are fundamentally broken. Guess I'll be switching to a new OS this weekend across multiple machines.

jorams•about 1 hour ago

> Guess I'll be switching to a new OS this weekend across multiple machines.

This is a bit of an odd response. Arch very explicitly separates the AUR from everything else and doesn't make it easy to work with, because its security model has always been fundamentally broken and requires you to do your own vetting. It exists to facilitate sharing of package recipes between untrusted users. You should treat it like a pastebin.

mqus•2 minutes ago

Tbh Arch itself is the most explicit about this compared to the derivatives. Manjaro etc allow installing AUR stuff directly from their main package manager

simoncion•25 minutes ago

> ...because its security model has always been fundamentally broken...

I disagree that "These packages are provided as-is. No work has been done to determine their safety or fitness for purpose. Use at your own risk!" is a "fundamentally broken" security model. It's one that places the burden of verification and validation on the system administrator and -in the case of the AUR- fully informs them of this fact. Treating system operators like the adults that they are isn't "fundamentally broken", but it is _much_ more work for that operator than if they relied exclusively on distro-vetted packages.

I do agree that it'd be fucking silly of OP to switch away from Arch because some of the packages in the collection of packages that are explicitly provided as "as-is and unvetted" got some malware in them.

rossvor•about 1 hour ago

Nothing here is "fundamentally broken". Any usage of AUR was always one step above executing random shell scripts from the net, and any official Archlinux guides were explicit about it. That's why there are no AUR helper tools in official repos and their usage was always discouraged in forums/wiki.

PKGBUILDs are easily readable/reviewable and rarely go beyond a single page. Just take a moment and be responsible and review before running executable files you download from the net. Common sense stuff. That's always been the trade-off and it hasn't really changed much in last 20 years (even though every few years everyone seems to freak out over it).

lordleft•32 minutes ago

You’re not wrong, but then we ought to pump the brakes in telling everyone and their mother to hop onto arch based distros that make installing AUR packages seem as safe as any other action (via Shelly on cachyos for example)

bachmeier•16 minutes ago

Honestly, it's hard to see how Arch is a usable distro for most potential users without AUR. If you want a large selection of official packages, the Debian world is going to be the better choice.

virajk_31•about 3 hours ago

AUR doesn't guarantee security, its upto the user to use AUR & verify before installing anything, its very evident why arch is not used in enterprise solutions.

fooqux•about 3 hours ago

It's not the AUR. It's the rolling release cycle, and probably even more importantly, lack of support options.

datakan•about 2 hours ago

The AUR has absolutely nothing to do with the rolling release cycle

virajk_31•about 1 hour ago

yes & comment didn't mention that both are dependent, fooqux is correct.

virajk_31•about 2 hours ago

Agree

hootz•about 3 hours ago

Arch is not used in enterprise solutions because of the AUR? Can't you just not use it?

virajk_31•about 2 hours ago

AUR is choice, rolling release is the reason

this_user•3 minutes ago

No, it's not. If Debian had a community-maintained repo of additional packages, the same thing could happen there.

The fundamental problem is having something that has very loose oversight and next to no controls. That may have worked in the past, but in the day and age of constant supply chain attacks, it's a major liability.