Pushes to arch AUR are suspendended right now.

EEbNar about 3 hours ago 44 commentsRead Article on lists.archlinux.org

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Discussion (44 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

numeri•about 2 hours ago

Well, I guess I'll avoid updating for the next few days. A bit worrisome that I did so last night.

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.

embedding-shape•about 2 hours ago

> naively and gratefully trust in the armies of volunteer maintainers is over

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.

dijit•about 1 hour ago

> did you not even review the PKGBUILD or anything else before installing stuff from the AUR?

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.

nvme0n1p1•about 1 hour ago

Why especially upgrades? Upgrades are way easier to review than new installs. Most diffs I see are just these two lines:

  -pkgver=1.7.2
  +pkgver=1.7.3

  -sha256sums=('aaaaaaaaaa')
  +sha256sums=('bbbbbbbbbb')

It takes like 5 seconds to read and press Y.

embedding-shape•about 1 hour ago

> I'd venture most people actually don't review pkgbuild; especially on upgrades.

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.

ireadmevs•about 1 hour ago

> the changes that end up in nixpkgs are all reviewed by maintainers

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.

matheusmoreira•37 minutes ago

> the era of being able to naively and gratefully trust in the armies of volunteer maintainers is over

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.

skydhash•about 1 hour ago

I used alpine linux and it looks pretty easy to setup your own repository, including build scripts for packages. I now use OpenBSD and the port systems of the BSD (each are different BTW) make it also easy to add extra software.

meribold•31 minutes ago

The explicit expectation with the AUR has always been that you can't blindly trust the PKGBUILD files. It's more like running an installer from a random website on Windows than it is to using official distro repositories. I think the wiki also always advised against using AUR helper tools that blur the lines between official repositories and the AUR.

DavideNL•26 minutes ago

Also see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49123208

evil-olive•about 2 hours ago

for context, 2 days ago:

Arch Linux disables AUR package adoption (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49123208)

lenerdenator•about 1 hour ago

Sadly, this is the future of a lot of FLOSS development unless people start to see their projects as their legacy instead of a simple hobby or a way to scratch an itch.

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.

matheusmoreira•28 minutes ago

Linus gets paid to be a BDFL. Pay me enough and I too will sit down and benevolently dictate things all day long. Until then, the world will have to make do with the blast radius.

plastic-enjoyer•4 minutes ago

lmao, no. start paying people for FLOSS development, and maybe then we can talk about holding them accountable for their projects. as long as there are no contracts and no payment, there’s no point in making demands of these people.

mijoharas•about 2 hours ago

So another active attack? Does anyone have any other details?

DavideNL•25 minutes ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49123208