Desktop Linux has always been a house of cards in regards to security. I agree it's amazing that it went on for so long, but this was inevitable.

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Matl 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

With regards to sandboxing etc. maybe. With regards to packages? Official repos support signing and usually rely on maintainers with proven track records. AUR was a honor system and since some people are total basement losers, you can't rely on that.

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Alive-in-2025 2 hours ago | parent [-]

We have locks on our doors for a reason. Any software that allows updates and relies on the honor system of "someone else must have checked this" will get hacked. Every day there's yet another certificate or secret stealing infection that is in some random upstream dependency in your dev tools or shell scripts or whatever.

	▲	Matl an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes, my point being this isn't some 'Desktop Linux security' hole. This was a known and intentional model of how the AUR operated for decades. Unfortunately it was bound to get exploited like this and so it did.
	▲	thayne 16 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Any software that allows updates and relies on the honor system of "someone else must have checked this" That is never how the AUR was supposed to work. Updates were intended to be a manual process where the user reviewed changes to the PKGBUILD.

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mindlessg 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Castles made of sand slips into the sea, eventually

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GreenVulpine 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Better than the commercial alternatives

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zahlman 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

More so than, say, Windows? Really?

And no, "people using one Linux distro can opt in to possibly getting pwned by each other by making use of a third-party software depot" does not reflect upon the entirety of the Linux world.

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nvme0n1p1 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's funny how these people say Linux security is bad because random people can upload arbitrary files to AUR, but won't say Windows security is bad because random people can upload arbitrary files to Microsoft GitHub.

	▲	davkan 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think the wrongful notion comes from the fact that the vast majority of Arch users use and speak about AUR as if it were a part of arch proper, only paying lip service to reviewing PKGBUILDS, etc. They wrap the default package manager in one that supports AUR and never touch it directly again. It feels closer to if all of GitHub was available in one click through the Microsoft store or windows update. And unfortunately that’s how arch is mainly marketed by its users. “Arch has the latest everything, if it’s not in the repos it’s on AUR” is one of the standard selling points. Of course that speaks to how people use linux insecurely not how Linux is insecure.
	▲	tosti 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		MS-Windows gets attacked by the hardware vendors, too.

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Barrin92 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

>More so than, say, Windows? Really?

significantly so. Windows has a coherent story when it comes to permissions and access. Differentiated out access controls, least privilege, UAC, mandatory integrity control and all configured out of the box.

Without AppArmor or SElinux correctly configured, which it isn't on most desktop distributions in the linux world most of your apps can still read anything, there's little sandboxing. The NT Kernel was designed with an object model in mind so you always had the abilities to have rich descriptions and policies for whatever you're handling where all of that is bolted on unix systems after the fact.

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tempfile 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I disagree. Maintainers for the major distributions take their roles very seriously, and do a very good job generally of filtering out malicious packages. The AUR is an outlier, being essentially an unmaintained wild west.

	▲	saghm 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The AUR is also not really comparable to official distribution package repositories either. Yes, it's hosted by the same people as the official repos that are comparable to what you'd get by default on other Linux distros, but it's intentionally not something that works with official package management tooling. The equivalent would be if Debian or Ubuntu hosted a repo that anyone could upload of unbuilt debian packages while explicitly not offering any tooling other than the usual tools for building a .deb from source files that you manually downloaded from anywhere else or defined yourself. It's definitely an outlier, but more in terms of being something that doesn't really exist anywhere else, so of course the security model for it will also be an outlier. That's not an excuse for any security issues, but it's not like Arch doesn't have official repos with maintainers who are just as diligent as any other distro. They just also happen to provide a public git server that people can publish packages to with a UI for seeing some of the package metadata; people could just as easily write toolling to automate package management where it looks for a GitHub repo instead of an AUR one to fetch the build files.