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?
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.)
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.
Nix portable installations, Soar.
Developers shouldn’t be making packages. They do things like vendor and pin dependencies, which lead to security and stability issues later down the line. See my other comment where I do a quick look at some of these issues.
Soar does look cool, but it requires you to install it first so that adds an extra installation step. Extra installation friction is very bad. And guess how they tell you to install Soar? 😄
Ok so how do these packages magically get made? Am I just supposed to not distribute my software? And don’t say “distros will do it” because that’s clearly a shit non-solution. No distro has made a package for any of the software I’ve written.
I hate this, but I’ve mentioned before in the other threads related to this that I make an exception for package managers due to their ability to install packages themselves.
Systems that protect people mean bureaucracy. And bureaucracy means slowness. It means many niche libraries or programs won’t get packaged. It means that it won’t get updated to the latest version immediately either, even if they receive security updates.
But as a consequence of these systems, Debian 12 remained entirely untouched by the XZ backdoor, when almost every other distribution was hit. That’s a pretty big deal.
As a consequence of a lack of these systems, many Windows programs are still floating around with vulnerable versions of curl, having included the software into their “package” but never bothering to update it.
I care more about the security of the users than the feelings of the developers. It’s that simple. Developers are a tiny fraction of total computer users. The needs of the many outweigh the wants of the few.