Pushes to arch AUR are suspendended right now. (lists.archlinux.org)
58 points by EbNar 3 hours ago
numeri 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 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 2 hours 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 2 hours ago
embedding-shape 2 hours ago
ireadmevs 2 hours 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
> 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.
Can't have it both ways.
Your packages can come from a small number of trusted individuals who maintain the software distribution. Naturally, this limits your choices to the packages they personally maintain. If you need something outside of that set, you need to ask them to include it or source it yourself.
Alternatively, your packages can come from a software repository that allows internet randoms to push literally anything. That expands your selection to all software ever created, which includes malware since nobody's doing the work to filter that stuff out.
Arch Linux offers both paradigms. Make an informed decision.
matheusmoreira an hour 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 2 hours 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 an hour 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 an hour ago
evil-olive 2 hours ago
for context, 2 days ago:
Arch Linux disables AUR package adoption (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49123208)
lenerdenator 2 hours 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 an hour 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 an hour 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 2 hours ago
So another active attack? Does anyone have any other details?
DavideNL an hour ago
Retr0id 13 minutes ago
That's the already-known attack being implied by "another".