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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

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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?

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[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Hilarious, but not a security issue. Just shitty Bash coding.

It absolutely is a security issue. I had a little brain fart, but what I meant to say was "Security isn't just protection from malice, but also protection from mistakes".

Let's put it differently:

Hilarious, but not a security issue. Just shitty C coding.

This is a common sentiment people say about C, and I have a the same opinion about it. I would rather we use systems in place that don't give people the opportunity to make mistakes.

I wish we had a viable alternative. Maybe the Linux community could work on that instead of moaning about it.

Viable alternative for what? Packaging.

I personally quite like the systems we have. The "install anything from the internet" is exactly how Windows ends up with so much malware. The best way to package software for users is via a package manager, that not only puts more eyes on the software, but many package managers also have built in functionality that makes the process more reliable and secure. For example signatures create a chain of trust. I really like Nix as a distro-agnostic package manager, because due to the unique way they do things, it's impossible for one package's build process to interfere with another.

If you want to do "install anything from the internet" it's best to do it with containers and sandboxing. Docker/podman for services, and Flatpak for desktop apps, where it's pretty easy to publish to flathub. Both also seem to be pretty easy, and pretty popular — I commonly find niche things I look at ship a docker image.

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 1 points 1 hour ago

This is a common sentiment people say about C, and I have a the same opinion about it. I would rather we use systems in place that don’t give people the opportunity to make mistakes.

The issue with C is it lets you make mistakes that commonly lead to security vulnerabilities - allowing a malicious third party to do bad stuff.

The Bash examples you linked are not security vulnerabilities. They don't let malicious third parties do anything. They done have CVEs, they're just straight up data loss bugs. Bad ones, sure. (And I fully support not using Bash where feasible.)

Viable alternative for what? Packaging.

A viable way to install something that works on all Linux distros (and Mac!), and doesn't require root.

The reason people use curl | bash is precisely so they don't have to faff around making a gazillion packages. That's not a good answer.