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Arch Linux AUR Under Another Wave Of Malicious Packages, Package Adoptions Halted (CachyOS) (www.phoronix.com)
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[–] 30 points 3 months ago (19 children)

Adoptions are a mistake anyways. Remove unmaintained packages and block the name for several months.

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  • [–] 41 points 3 months ago (13 children)

    Adoption of unmaintained packages to maintain them is not a mistake. The problem is the current implementation, not the idea behind it. It's like saying the AUR is a mistake, because some people do malicious stuff.

    They should find a better solution, like adoption shouldn't be granted to everyone without question, especially new accounts who didn't maintain anything before. Mass adoption shouldn't be granted automatically (limit rate), in example 1 package adoption per day and if someone wants more, admins or moderators need to approve. And updates of newly adopted packages should wait a day.

    Also the AUR helpers should do a better job. Always ask if a new adopted package should be updated and give a warning the maintainer changed.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    The problem is the current implementation

    Yes, exactly this! I am not surprised it happens. I’m surprised it didn’t happen before.

    especially new accounts

    Weren’t there “sleeper accounts” registered years ago that became active in the current wave?

    Also the AUR helpers should do a better job.

    Even experienced people will just update as if nothing could happen. Adopted packages should have to use a different name and the current name being blocked so it WILL get attention when some tries to update their system.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

    Weren’t there “sleeper accounts” registered years ago that became active in the current wave?

    Which does not invalidate my point about new accounts, but yes. Its important for new accounts, so once a sleeper account is banned, its not that easy to just create thousands of new accounts while everyone is focusing on the current active ones. And if, as I suggested, mass adoption per account is not possible, then the attacker has less to attack.

    Edit: They need to make sure that sudden editing many packages in short time, with probably the same or similar lines should be automatically reported. They need some automated checks in place, at the very least. This would be a very suspicious behavior if many accounts are not active, and then suddenly all of them do something.

    Even experienced people will just update as if nothing could happen.

    Then you can't fault the system, if you are this reckless.

    Adopted packages should have to use a different name and the current name being blocked so it WILL get attention when some tries to update their system.

    This would break all dependencies of this package. The point of adoption is to keep it working and stable. I'm highly against force changing the name, that is not a solution (at least not one I am happy about).

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    [Changing a package’s name] would break all dependencies of this package.

    Yes, that is correct. But that should not be a big deal for packages that are actively maintained. The maintainer can simply change the dependency to the new name after making sure the new package is legit.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago*

    OK, that's a good point. It would prevent auto updating. However any package that is NOT updated, should stay with same name in my opinion. So that everything (with the old secure code) stays intact and working. The name change should be part of the the update process. So it only breaks if you want to update, which would ensure compatibility if you choose not to (as it is safe). Something along the likes like this. I agree with your suggestion now, because that seems to be sensible idea.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (7 children)

    They should find a better solution

    Who's "they"? Because it's not Arch. Arch doesn't want to have anything to do with AUR, and neither does any of the Arch-derived distros. They're all perfectly happy taking advantage of it, of course, but not the responsibility.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago* (6 children)

    Who’s “they”? Because it’s not Arch. Arch doesn’t want to have anything to do with AUR, and neither does any of the Arch-derived distros. They’re all perfectly happy taking advantage of it, of course, but not the responsibility.

    Where did you got this nonsense from? What do you mean "they are not Arch"? The AUR is managed and operated by the Archlinux team. As the packages are community-driven content, they cannot guarantee and give support, because it is not their package. But they are still managing and supporting the AUR itself.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    it's not managing, as you seem to imply, it's just hosting.

    Arch hosts the AUR repository, the maintenance of the packages is on the developers who developed the package.

    If someone sneaks in spyware or malware inside the makepkg, that isn't arch's fault, that's the maintainers fault of the makepkg.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    If someone sneaks in spyware or malware inside the makepkg, that isn’t arch’s fault, that’s the maintainers fault of the makepkg.

    I don't think that anyone argued otherwise.

    I even said it in the very reply you are replying:

    The AUR is managed and operated by the Archlinux team. As the packages are community-driven content, they cannot guarantee and give support, because it is not their package.

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  • [+] -6 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    And you're gonna see the Arch team wash their hands of the whole thing, like they did in the past whenever the AUR was in trouble.

    That's not real ownership.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Do you have any sources, links or evidence for your statements?

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  • [–] -3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Is the current state of the AUR, despite the previous waves of attacks, and its troubled history, not evidence enough? The Arch team has never made the AUR a priority and I don't see why they would start now.

    The way I see it there are three possibilities:

    • They do nothing.
    • They shut it down.
    • They give it up for adoption.

    What is not going to happen is the Arch team putting time and effort into overhauling the AUR.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Remove unmaintained packages and block the name for several months.

    Alright, but that would mean most of AUR. Have a look at the package statistics box on the AUR homepage. Most packages fall under that definition in one way or another. The vast majority of the AUR is package some random person added once then never bothered with ever again.

    Frankly I'm surprised that the AUR has survived for so long in its current form, for what is basically a shell script distribution system with zero supervision and zero safety guards.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    The vast majority of the AUR is package some random person added once then never bothered with ever again.

    Yes, that sucks. But I was thinking of exclusively this packages: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages?submit=Orphans

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    From the mailing list thread:

    For the record, those are all new packages (not orphaned packages being adopted). I assume more will come, we'll clean those as soon as possible.

    In the mean time stay vigilant, probably refrain from installing freshly pushed new packages from the AUR for now.

    So wasn't adoption in this case. Looks like instead they submitted a bunch of git/bin versions of existing packages.

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    • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Do I really need to audit my system again?

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago

    Not if you follow the normal safety precautions for using the AUR. There are several things you can do to look for red flags, but the most essential thing is to read the PKGBUILDs. And helpers like yay, paru and Shelly can all show diffs which makes that much easier after the initial installation because in most cases you'll just see that the version and checksum has changed which means it's as trustworthy as last time.

    This has always been the case, and will continue to be the case unless the Arch team restricts the AUR which quickly can make it lose exactly what makes it so good.

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    • [–] 13 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (14 children)

    I use malware, btw 😎

    Arch should be stopped to be recommended to new users of Linux ASAP

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (6 children)

    Is anybody really recommending Arch to new users though?

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Yeah, there's a ton of people that recommend Cachy when it is really meant for tinkerers IMHO

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

    I'm very tired of the rhetoric that Arch is only meant for tinkerers. If all you do is have plasma steam and a web browser it's no more or less likely to break than any other distro. You could go your entire life without ever looking at the terminal.

    And while yes this malware is a problem it is specifically in the aur, the arch user repository an unofficial repository not officially supported, just don't use it. Unless you need a weird piece of software generally related to some type of specific hobby you're unlikely to ever even want to look at it anyway.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    I do agree with this in theory. I just don't know many 'normal people' that are going to only ever require those three things. (Totally with you on the AUR bit)

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    Really? If anything I have the opposite problem all the normal people I'm aware of probably don't even need steam just the web browser and plasma. Pretty much everything is in the web browser these days I mean they might want the dedicated discord client but that's ultimately just a web browser in a box and will also work perfectly no AUR required

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Arch as far as I am aware has never been recommended to new users. Sure their is CachyOS and other variants. And on top of that AUR you shut read the build scripts. But I suppose not many people do that unfortunately.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    more importantly, they don't recommend that users use the AUR repository (that isn't to say they are opposed to it). Some advice they have given is to review what the dependencies are before executing the package with an AUR helper or manually.

    Just to make a point, there is a surplus of these non officially supported (from OS developers) repositories, such as the terra repository for fedora. It has the same vulnerability as AUR, and yet that is targeted for new users.

    Much like how fedora doesn't officially support Terra, arch doesn't support AUR. There is a reason why it's called AUR (arch user repository) over ASR (arch supported repository). AUR entails that it is not supported by arch.

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    • [–] 9 points 3 months ago

    Why tf didn't they leave it disabled since the last attack?

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    [–] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Just saw DeepSeek TUI in there, that's probably going to be a whopper that hit quite a few users.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 child)

    You mean https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/deepseek-tui-git from the list https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/aur-general@lists.archlinux.org/thread/P4WIRHTFNH2YZWQHGBAKQWX5YOAFIDLY/ ? It has 0 votes and Popularity is at 0.000000, since it was uploaded 2 months ago. And there is a non Git version that is not listed (probably not affected) at https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/deepseek-tui . On top of it, on their website https://deepseek-tui.org/#install the main recommended way to install it is with npm and there is even a way to build it with Rust it seems (I'm a bit unsure).

    So I don't think it hit that many users, as only a couple of people since Mai would want to install it, and they have to have updated it to build from source in recent days. That is a very narrow number of people, just by my gut feeling.

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    • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    Man I feel like I dodged a bullet switching to Fedora right before this AUR fuckery started to happen...

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    You don't have to use AUR to use Arch. Just like PPA for Ubuntu or Fedora's Copr.

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    • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (10 children)

    friends don't let friends use the AUR

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (6 children)

    What's the alternative?

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I only use official and flatpak, I wouldn't even use flatpak if official had more.

    Chaotic aur might be worth looking into if aur is what you want. Everything there is theoretically checked.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    Are you sure about chaotic? I removed it as I thought it wasn't really checked as I read in a comment here.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    might be worth looking into

    I'm not sure of anything, I would look into it further were I planning on using it, which I might do in the future, Garuda KDE lite looks like a decent distro.

    From the little I have looked into it, it is all meant to be checked, adding an extra layer of protection, as long as your trust the people behind it (much like official I guess)

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  • [–] -5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    all they have to do is to check the damn diff, if that's not easy for someone then they should stop using a computer altogether. I mean they could just click to random links on the internet right?

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    • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    I feel like when this pops up everyone freaks out and yells about how it's proof the aur sucks and arch is doomed. Do you people randomly install GitHub repos without any due diligence? Do you click on random ads to download bake bean can cursors? There's malware fuckin everywhere. Just do your due diligence and don't get screwed. And if you do get malware, have a plan to make it irrelevant. Anyone who doesn't do these things should in no way be using the AUR.

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    [+] -11 points 3 months ago* (5 children)

    No way to prevent this, says only repo where this regularly happens

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    I mean, nobody is saying there is no way to prevent this, and I would hardly say that "twice" can be cathegorized as regularly.

    Also I find this of extremely bad taste as you seem to compare this to school shootings, with literal children deaths. I would say that a few thinkerers getting pwned from their claude tokens is a couple orders of magnitude less serious.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (1 child)

    Isn't this similar to the reason a lot of people hate snaps? Or am I misunderstanding something? I'm not an Arch user (btw) so I'm not super familiar with AUR.

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    • 5 comments in c/archlinux@lemmy.ml view that post
    [–] 6 points 3 months ago

    I'm starting to think it's time the AUR introduced namespacing packages by the maintainer's AUR username. The single namespace was nice while it lasted, but it seems like we're going to need to get packages based on who's uploading them anyways...

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    [–] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I wonder why Aur is a target.

    You think it's Microsoft related?

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  • [–] 12 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Probably because it's an attack vector where the effort required to infiltrate malware is relatively low.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    From the mailing list thread:

    For the record, those are all new packages (not orphaned packages being adopted). I assume more will come, we'll clean those as soon as possible.

    In the mean time stay vigilant, probably refrain from installing freshly pushed new packages from the AUR for now.

    Looking over the list it's almost all git/bin versions of files. So they just added a ton of new packages like hexchat-bin that didn't have those versions before and injected malware.

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    • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    I stopped using AUR long before these packages and before the DDOS attacks. Mostly because I started rewriting the code of different applications to compile with QT5 or GTK3. For that I need the source, not what's uploaded on AUR. Which makes me think why I'm still keeping trizen when I don't even use it. 😆

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    1 comment in c/archlinux@discuss.tchncs.de view that post
    [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    🤦

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