Linux

6466 readers

624 users here now

A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system

Also check out:

Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Ategon@programming.dev

anzo@programming.dev

dwraf_of_ignorance@programming.dev

277

Am in the only one who cringes at install instructions that require piping some curl output into bash? (programming.dev)

submitted 2 days ago by cschreib@programming.dev to c/linux@programming.dev

162 comments fedilink hide all child comments

curl https://some-url/ | sh

I see this all over the place nowadays, even in communities that, I would think, should be security conscious. How is that safe? What's stopping the downloaded script from wiping my home directory? If you use this, how can you feel comfortable?

I understand that we have the same problems with the installed application, even if it was downloaded and installed manually. But I feel the bar for making a mistake in a shell script is much lower than in whatever language the main application is written. Don't we have something better than "sh" for this? Something with less power to do harm?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] jagged_circle@feddit.nl 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

You're telling me that you dont verify the signatures of the binaries you download before running them too?!? God help you.

I download my binaries with apt, which will refuse to install the binary if the signature doesn't match.

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

No because there's very little point. Checking signatures only makes sense if the signatures are distributed in a more secure channel than the actual software. Basically the only time that happens is when software is distributed via untrusted mirror services.

Most software I install via curl | bash is first-party hosted and signatures don't add any security.

[–] jagged_circle@feddit.nl 0 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

All publishing infrastructure shouldn't be trusted. Theres countless historical examples of this.

Use crypto. It works.

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 0 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Crypto is used. It is called TLS.

You have to have some trust of publishing infrastructure, otherwise how do you know your signatures are correct?

[–] jagged_circle@feddit.nl 0 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

TLS is a joke because of X.509.

We dont need to trust any publishing infrastructure because the PGP private keys don't live on the publishing infrastructure. We solved this issue in the 90s

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 0 points 7 hours ago

If you think PGP solved anything at all you're living in a fantasy land lol