uecker 2 days ago

It is definitely not fine. The argument seems to be that since you need to trust somebody, curl | bash is fine because you just trust whoever controls the webserver. I think this is missing the point.

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  • oddmiral 2 days ago

    s/webserver/DNS/

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    • arthur2e5 2 days ago

      HTTPS is there, so you go down to that level only if you want to distrust any element of the public key infrastructure. Which, to be fair, there are plenty of reasons if you are paranoid -- they do tell you who's doing what in a shady way as they revoke, so there's a huge list of transgressions.

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      • zzo38computer a day ago

        It is not only that directly; the domain name might be reassigned to someone else, resulting in a valid certificate which is different than the one you wanted. (If you have the hash of the file which you have verified independently then it is more secure (if the hash algorithm is secure enough), although HTTPS is not needed in that case, it can still be used if you wish to avoid spies knowing which file you accessed. You can also use the server's public key if you know what it should be, although this has different issues, such as someone compromising the server (or the key) and modifying the script.) (There is also knowing if the script is what you intended or not anyways (or if there is something unexpected due to the configuration on your computer); if that is your issue, you can read it (and perhaps verifying the character encoding) before executing it, whether or not you trust the server operator and the author of that script.)

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        • IshKebab a day ago

          > the domain name might be reassigned to someone else

          If that happens its game over. As the article I linked noted, the attackers can change the installation instructions to anything they want - even for packages that are available in Linux distros.

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  • whyever 2 days ago

    It's missing which point?

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    • uecker 2 days ago

      That you should be very careful about what you install. Cut&pasting some line from a website is the exact opposite of it. This is mostly about psychology and not technology. But there are also other issues with this, e.g. many independent failure points at different levels, no transparency, no audit chain, etc. The counter model we tried to teach people in the past is that people select a linux distribution, independently verify fingerprints of the installation media, and then only install packages from the curated a list of packages. A lot of effort went into making this safe and close the remaining issues.

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      • IshKebab 2 days ago

        None of that has anything to do with curl|bash.

        Be careful who you trust when installing software is a fine thing to teach. But that doesn't mean the only people you can trust are Linux distro packagers.

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