Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Packages

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arch-Linux-AUR-More-Than-1500

by qwertox • 1 month ago

319 213 1 month ago

As always a fair reminder to not install random 3rd party packages/libraries/applications without reviewing them, especially when there is zero vetting. Luckily this was constrained to AUR, which basically is a free-for-all package repository, with users being warned multiple times that it's vital to review anything before you install it, compared to the official repositories.

`rua` and other similar CLIs make it really easy to review the packages before installing them from AUR too, and if you are doing banking on the same computer, you really have no excuse not to review the software you depend on. Keeping the amount of packages low, only use what you need, also makes this a whole lot simpler when it's time to upgrade.

dbgobrrr• 1 month ago

users being warned multiple times that it's vital to review anything before you install it, compared to the official repositories.

I think this stance should be re-evaluated. Arch Linux developers are doing a fantastic job and I am personally thankful to them - this is not in any way critical of them. And while I don't see an easy solution here, I just feel that the time of "warning users" is long gone with how much supply-chain attacks are ramping up these days.

Some other controls could at least alleviate the problem. Perhaps some form of peer-review and grace period before publishing could help here?

embedding-shape21• 1 month ago

Personally, what you suggest would defeat the purpose of the AUR, and what you describe is already applied to the official packages. If you want only the safe and stable stuff, don't use random packages from AUR :)

anon70002• 1 month ago

Idk. Arch does have official repositories that are actively maintained and vetted. AUR is for the vast amounts of random software that isn’t popular or important enough to be officially maintained.

I’m not sure how to find a balance. One reason to use Arch is to always have the latest software, especially if you’re gaming. (Need to run very recent kernels, GPU drivers, and DEs to support new graphics cards.) So that’s very different from other stable LTS distros which carefully pick the package updates they incorporate.

Anyways, I do agree package cooldowns and such make a lot of sense. Package managers should be pulling out the stops on all the free controls they can implement. I can understand why anything requiring compute or maintainer time is a non-starter. (Sidebar: I don’t feel the same way about npm. Microsoft can afford to run malware scanners and analysis tools on npm packages.)

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Official_repositories

mcv2• 1 month ago

It's definitely a sign that popular packages should be moved from AUR to the official repository. I've got some stuff from AUR simply because it's something I need and that's where it is, and I never really verify it's safe; I just trust it blindly. Clearly a bad idea. I guess I should learn to avoid AUR and when I do use something from it, we more aware it's an exception and I need to check it more thoroughly. That's something I normally only do only for stuff that's neither from AUR nor the official repo.

thewebguyd• 1 month ago

Some other controls could at least alleviate the problem

The biggest one I'd suggest they change immediately is remove the ability for anyone to just take over an orphaned package. That's a crazy policy, to me.

It should require you to fork it & resubmit, not take over the original.

Then they can go through and do purges of orphaned packages that are beyond a certain age.

cge4• 1 month ago

`rua` and other similar CLIs make it really easy to review the packages before installing them from AUR too, and if you are doing banking on the same computer, you really have no excuse not to review the software you depend on.

What review should users do?

It appears that, in some cases, these were adding npm as a dependency and installing atomic-lockfile, and in others, these were adding bun and installing js-digest. This was a mass attack against mostly low-use/orphaned/etc packages where maintainership was taken over or a different user uploaded a new version (itself a very simple, low-notice, low-oversight process), and many of the packages clearly had no connection to Node.js at all, so a user who knew enough about each package, and knew what npm was, might notice the oddity in the package, if they reviewed every line of the PKGBUILD, then reviewed the install scripts.

But legitimate AUR packages for packages connected to Node.js also use npm, for example, and at times, use npm install. A user would have to be familiar enough with Archlinux's build system to understand the difference between each part (eg, build() vs install scripts). They'd have to review every PKGBUILD, every install script, and every patch of every AUR package they install. For packages that actually do use npm/bun, they'd have to be familiar enough to know what uses were legitimate and what uses were not, and might have to be up to date on compromised dependencies. And this is still considering a mass attack that was not particularly hidden. Attacks could be made much harder to find.

Asking a user to safely review an AUR package essentially seems like it is asking them to fully understand not just the build process, and programming language, of the upstream package, but also all details of Archlinux's build system. They need to learn how to do this with, as far as I can tell, no real guidance: AUR itself, and the wiki's page on it, just warn that users should carefully review the PKGBUILD and install scripts, without giving any substantial guidance on what to look for or how to review anything. The warnings feel much more like liability-reduction than an attempt to be helpful.

At that point, what is AUR actually offering that installing the upstream package isn't? It feels like the suggested 'safe' way of using AUR would make it just as much work for the user, and require just as much knowledge, as either installing the upstream directly, or even making a package for it.

There is perhaps some room for LLM analysis here: Opus 4.8, Kimi latest, and even Qwen3.6 27B quickly catch at least the current round of malicious packages in my tests. But a motivated attacker could make that more difficult, or dangerous. And a user could also just have those models install the upstream package, with less risk. If they want to use pacman for management, they could likely even have those LLMs generate a package, with less risk.

yjftsjthsd-h• 1 month ago

At that point, what is AUR actually offering that installing the upstream package isn't?

It produces package files that pacman can use. Sure, you can curl|sh or whatever, but that's a good way to litter stuff all over that you can't track or uninstall cleanly.

SCdF2• 1 month ago

Not all tools are made for inexperienced people. Not everything is idiot proof. This is OK!

In my experience using the AUR:

1. when you first install the package you can read the build script (and you should). These are in a very standard structure, and if the one you are reading is weird and complicated consider not installing it. No one is forcing you to. Almost every build script I read just downloads a build from a tagged github release.

2. when you get an upgrade you are shown the diff. For almost every AUR package I use this is literally just changing the $VERSION variable and the subsequent $HASH of the download. It is trivial to see if anything (in the AUR script) is happening that is sneaky.

It's really not that scary. And if it's considered scary, there are literally dozens of other linux distros (not to mention Windows or MacOS) you could be using instead.

embedding-shape21• 1 month ago

What review should users do?

The same sort of review you'd do if a stranger sends over a project and says "compile and run this" and you actually want whatever it's supposed to do, so you start looking through it.

It appears that, in some cases, these were adding npm as a dependency and installing atomic-lockfile, and in others, these were adding bun and installing js-digest

That's very suspicious if the package you're about to install doesn't seem to actually need those things. Since "AUR === random strangers on the internet with zero trust", then you need to pay attention to those sort of things.

Asking a user to safely review an AUR package essentially seems like it is asking them to fully understand not just the build process, and programming language, of the upstream package, but also all details of Archlinux's build system.

Yes, indeed. Same as if you come across a random C++ project on GitHub with 2 stars, do you just pull down the source and compile willy-nilly? Probably not, you carefully inspect it can actually do what you want, how it does it, and so on. AUR is basically like GitHub in this case, zero peer-reviews and users fully responsible for whatever they install.

At that point, what is AUR actually offering that installing the upstream package isn't?

PKGBUILDs, so you don't have to write them yourself. Not more, not less, just a central place for random strangers to share PKGBUILDs that may or may not work for others.

mcv2• 1 month ago

It's still surprising someone was able to infect so many packages. But I admit I don't really know how AUR works. Can anyone with access simply update anything? Do packages not have owners who check contributions?

jorams• 1 month ago

Packages in the AUR have some number of maintainers. When a maintainer no longer wants to maintain the package they can disown it, and when all maintainers do so the package becomes orphaned. An orphaned package can then be adopted by any user.

At any time there's a large number of orphaned packages in the AUR, and the attacker(s) targeted those.

embedding-shape21• 1 month ago

But I admit I don't really know how AUR works

It's basically GitHub (in terms of "User's generated content") but tailored and specific to Arch/Arch-derived distributions. Packages have owners, but everything is very "freeform" in general on the AUR. It wasn't uncommon you could be added as a maintainer by just sending a mail to the current maintainer, since it's basically "Hey let me contribute to your repository" (simplified), today people keep track a bit better and avoided that I've seen. But still, it's on a individual basis.

Just like GitHub, AUR is completely devoid of peer-reviews, users uploads their own PKGBUILD and share with others, and the expectation is that users review stuff before they install it, just like on GitHub, or just like on the internet in general.

cosmic_cheese• 1 month ago

I think it’s a great argument for some combo of immutable system files, installation of packages as user-local by default (making elevated manager privileges unnecessary), and components and programs being given as little privilege as possible by default.

There’s bits and pieces of this in place with immutable distros, Wayland, and Flatpak but notable holes remain. The biggest one is that sandboxing is tied to the package format which I think is a mistake. Sandboxing and access permissions should be a system-level thing so even arbitrary binaries can’t easily slip through the cracks.

This wouldn’t fix the problem entirely, but it’d greatly limit the blast radius and make users of the distribution a less juicy target.

blcknight• 1 month ago

"Review" them how? Read every single line of code before installing something? If it's a binary package, how do you do that? Make reproducible builds for everything you install? Move to from source distro? Putting this on users is not a tenable solution. There's room for common sense, but blaming the users for this is ridiculous

t-3• 1 month ago

An archlinux package build file is just a shell script. It's pretty easy to take a look and see if all the manifest info is right and it doesn't do more than ./configure; make; make install DESTDIR=$PKG or whatever. If you're building random software using random instructions from the internet and don't make sure they're not malicious, you only have yourself to blame when you catch something. Actually reading through the source files for vulns is something best left for automatic detection, checking the build script is basic.

kcyb• 1 month ago

As an arch user, I would always skim the PKGBUILD file of AUR packages to see if they install the software they claim to install from official sources and if there's something obviously fishy.

embedding-shape21• 1 month ago

Lets take two real and random examples, and I'll share what I'd look for:

First, very easy one, we want to install Brave, so we find https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/brave-bin. All the dependencies are in the official repos already, so those we trust already, you open the downloaded PKGBUILD and you find it's downloading a binary from github.com/brave, you check to see it's the official GitHub profile/organization that you expect. Quickly scan prepare/package for anything out of place, like downloading more files not defined in "source" or whatever. In this case, "suid sandbox" stuff should make you investigate closer so you understand what that stuff does, many things related to Chrome has things like that. That AUR package also has a brave-bin.sh, so a look through that would make sense. AFAIK, everything checks out, this is literally just downloading the official release from GitHub, and extracts it into the right place, so if you trust the GitHub org/user, you can trust the PKGBUILD. The PKGBUILD also seems to be officially maintained by Brave themselves, so probably already there you can verify the AUR user and be done if you feel lax.

Second example is unofficial package, https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/lmstudio-bin, maintained by noureddinex and created by MadGoat, neither which seem official at a glance. Read through the comments to see if anyone else flagged anything, seems fine so again go read the source of the package and the PKGBUILD. PKGBUILD seems standard, downloads something from "installers.lmstudio.ai" so first thing to check is if that's actually the official website, so use search engine to find official website, copy the URL of the download, verify it's the same. In this case, lmstudio.ai is the real website, but download URL on website ends up being "https://lmstudio.ai/download/latest/linux/x64" in the HTML/DOM, so use "curl -v -L $URL" to see redirects, and then we've confirmed installers.lmstudio.ai is actually what they use for official releases. Read through "prepare" and "package", both seem standard and fine, then look through the rest of the files, all of them seem fine, mostly maintenance scripts for the AUR package itself. Package seems fine as a whole, and we could install it, if we're willing to review it again on upgrades in the future.

This is basically all you have to do. Writing what I did while doing it, made each "review" take maybe 5-10 minutes, and it isn't harder than that, regardless who the user is. You just need to know what to look for, and think how you'd "officially" install it anyways. And if what the PKGBUILD differs from what you'd imagine an "official install" would do, investigate if it makes sense and if not, don't install the package, maybe leave a comment for others in AUR to dive deeper.

yowo• 1 month ago

This is like saying a user who clone a random git repo is not to blame and git-scm should do more to prevent cloning of malicious repos. If it is not official, it is your job to review, if you dont like it, use iOS instead of Arch Linux.

If you crash your car, you are liable for the accident. If you aren't ready for that, take the bus.

More power = more responsibility

clickety_clack• 1 month ago

It’s free lines of code on the internet that you are going out of your way to run on your own machine.

gchamonlive• 1 month ago

Ask an LLM to assess the package and do a web search for you. Nobody is installing tens of packages a day, you can take a few minutes to consider what you are installing. This isn't blaming the user, it's basic digital hygiene.

jolmg• 1 month ago

If it's a binary package, how do you do that?

You find one that builds from source, or you still review PKGBUILD and friends and lean more on evaluating the reputation of upstream and its maintainers, or you simply decide never to install binary packages. Your policy is yours to decide.

Putting this on users is not a tenable solution.

The alternative would be to not have an AUR. Archlinux has official package repos where packages are vetted. The AUR (Arch User Repository) is not that. The AUR is there to provide greater variety of software than the official repos can, and it does that by not incurring the cost of being individually maintained by volunteer Arch staff and developers. It needs to not incur that cost for it to exist, otherwise it'd just be the official repos. It's like github, but limited to repos with PKGBUILDs.

-mlv• 1 month ago

I recall the AUR always being touted very highly as some great advantage for Arch as a linux distro, unfortunately this convenience has also come with a price.

It's crazy that all it takes to become a maintainer of a package is to flag it as orphaned, wait 2 weeks for the original maintainer to fail to respond because they're on a holiday, and BAM! - the attacker can gets assigned as a maintainer and can now ship spicy updates.

dualvariable5• 1 month ago

That is a terrible way to run a package repo in this day and age.

Maintainers need to have some level of vetting, and should own a repo or three for a while to establish a track record, before they get to blast out contributions to 100 of them without any review.

glitchc• 1 month ago

This is great but ultimately unactionable advice, which makes it worse than useless because it sounds good at first brush but upon inspection turns out to be ridiculous. There is more code out there than is readable by any human being in their lifetime.

I'm willing to bet you yourself have read <1% of the source code currently running on your computers. Does this mean you have stopped using your computer(s)? How can you trust anything that happens on them?

sam_lowry_3• 1 month ago

As someone already explained in a sibling comment, Arch Linux AUR packages are simple shell scripts that download source code from upstream, apply patches and install.

I review them every time I have to install from AUR.

matheusmoreira3• 1 month ago

I review the source code of every AUR package I install. It's not that difficult to do some basic due dilligence. Now with AI it's even easier.

Gud• 1 month ago

So easy to say.

For a distro this popular I’m surprised how much is in unofficial repos(AUR) and not the official ones.

tryauuum• 1 month ago

How bad was it?

graemep2• 1 month ago

1,500 packages out of 107,000 so pretty bad, ameliorated by only affecting installs of those in a window of a few days.

AUR comes with a warning that its up to you to check what you install from there.

maxerickson• 1 month ago

I wonder what typical AUR usage looks like. I apparently have 27 packages installed and last updated one in November.

__s• 1 month ago

I was concerned at headline, then saw "oh just AUR"

Next up, "millions of malicious packages still not taken down on internet"

anthonj4• 1 month ago

I cringed hard when some people started to make pacman wrappers that could install from AUR directly.

I've installed stuff from the aur before but most of the times I prefer to skip the middleman and just navigate to the project website. A premade pkgbuild is not convenient enough to take the risk of typoquatting or the tactical npm or pip dependency.

Grombobulous• 1 month ago

For me, this tradeoff isn’t worth it. I didn’t switch to Linux so that I can waste time going to websites and clicking “download” to update my programs like a Windows user.

The pacman wrappers you mention are crazy, though.

anthonj4• 1 month ago

I get it, but you only need to do that for the odd cases of packages not present in the official repo (not that common at all for me at least).

Also if the software is downloaded in the form of a git repo, you only needed to checkout the new tag and rebuild, don't need your browser at all.

pixelpoet• 1 month ago

typoquatting

Perfect demonstration!

OJFord3• 1 month ago

`yay` (one such wrapper) shows me the PKGBUILD diff on every update. The first time I install something I verify the URL, and check any install script etc. seems sensible; the vast majority of subsequent updates are changes to just version number & checksum. A typosquat attack would be very obvious.

(It's a bit vulnerable to it on first install, but so is 'just navigate to the project website [and click download]'.)

anthonj4• 1 month ago

But it's one middle man less.

Git repo have been attacked other times in the past, but a 500/1000 stars project still sounds more trustworthy than a user repository managed by randos with a couple of upvotes. I still use the aur for simple cases, but when I see aur packages depending on multiple other aur packages I immediately leave.

cromka• 1 month ago

Does it also show each patch involved?

feelamee• 1 month ago

and how many of others do the same? At least I'm not.. Happily I have only a few aur packages

mqus• 1 month ago

This sounds like your update process is quite involved then. Or do you just not do it?

anthonj4• 1 month ago

I only have a couple of things in /opt/ and some manually installed fonts, and vim plugins in my home. Everything else that I don't use often lives in the original cloned git repo in /home/projects and never really gets installed.

Of course the process breaks down for a large amount of packets, but I've never been in that situation. In part because the official repo is already large, and in part because I like minimalism.

If that even became an issue, I would manage a personal set of pkgbuild probably.

zenoprax• 1 month ago

People continue to criticize Arch for being elitist or gate-keeping to keep casuals out but there are clear benefits by not allowing dangerous things to be simple. This is true in many aspects of life.

After using Void Linux I switched to `aurutils` to get a similar separation on Arch. I can easily maintain a local AUR repo by compiling/making my own binaries and can use `pacman` to install and manage them which improves the upgrade process overall.

recursivegirth• 1 month ago

People continue to criticize Arch for being elitist or gate-keeping

I have the complete opposite experience. Arch makes it easy to get in and get hacking right away. Their beginner guide's on the wiki were a gem 10-15 years ago... made it super easy to get up and running. I don't have the time these days to tinker - but boy do I love some Arch.

qudat• 1 month ago

I don’t bother with wrappers, why does it need to be easier than git clone + makepkg -i?

Then I just update when I need to update

beej715• 1 month ago

The wrapper will give you a nice diff of what changed. You can do that by hand, too, though.

BobbyTables2• 1 month ago

AUR and similar repos for other distros scare the hell out of me.

Tutorials using them are so widespread… Start feeling like a weirdo for not wanting to give an unknown rando full indefinite root access to the system, with virtually zero peer review… all to install one version of a package where updates are undesired or infrequent…

KetoManx64• 1 month ago

You don't have to. The AUR is just a bunch of PKGBUILD text files, which if you don't feel competent enough to read and understand and trust, you can create your own local versions of and install from. It's just a recipe file that says download a program from this github URL, make sure the hash matches and then extract it and move the files to system directories.

Havoc• 1 month ago

As I undertood it this was mostly orphaned packages?

Shank• 1 month ago

That's correct, orphaned packages could be adopted seemingly automatically, so someone did and then published malware in bulk.

beej715• 1 month ago

This makes me want to adopt more packages. Lots of the orphans barely need updating.

gbin• 1 month ago

Yes and honestly super kudos to paru's creator for the nagging warning about installed orphan packages that made me remove them immediately.

So with a dozen of various systems running arch/cachyos for various purposes, 0 impact.

We seriously dodged a bullet though, should we have some kind of AI spotting shady activity before it hits the userbase?

ajross• 1 month ago

Not even "packages" in the distro sense. You can't use software installed with Arch to install this stuff via any path that isn't isomorphic to rebuilding the package yourself.

This was the AUR repository, which is the community-maintained soup of non-distro packages. They're packaged using the same tools and technology, with the intent that they can be easily validated and promoted to core stuff in the future. But they aren't really "Arch Linux". You need to deliberately enable and install tools to pull stuff from it.

Think of this as Steam or Chrome. You can install those on Arch, and people do, but if Chrome extensions or Steam games suffer an incident like this you don't blame the distro.

cge4• 1 month ago

They're packaged using the same tools and technology, with the intent that they can be easily validated and promoted to core stuff in the future.

That's perhaps the intent ideally, but in practice, it feels like AUR tends to be (a) niche, esoteric things that will never be anywhere outside of AUR, even if they could, or (b) installation methods for proprietary/otherwise non-open packages that can't be.

The latter seems to a major popular use of AUR: sorting packages by popularity or votes comes up with lists that seem to be mostly these. And that's likely a significant draw for non-technical users. If you want to install things like Dropbox, Chrome, VS Code, Minecraft, Zoom, Slack... they all show up in AUR. By their nature (usually extracting packages from upstream installation methods), they tend to be more complicated than generic AUR packages. They are also often quite a bit more convenient than using the upstream packages, which might not interface well with Archlinux, might only be available with installation methods that clobber things, might be deb/rpm only, etc.

I wonder if it would make sense to have a more trusted/vetted repository of these sorts of scripts, separate from core repositories but also not as free-for-all as AUR. That might go a long way toward keeping non-technical users from being drawn to AUR.

robby_w_g• 1 month ago

I’ve made a point of not installing any AUR packages. It’s really tempting when there’s a package that’s not available via pacman, but at the end of the day I’d rather build from source myself or use a docker image.

anothermoron• 1 month ago

Sadly they forced anybody with an older nvidia gpu to use some AUR package some months back.

popcornricecake• 1 month ago

I've made a point of always installing software via the package manager. That means making my own PKGBUILDs if there's not already good ones available. I don't want to ever sidestep the package manager and go `sudo make install` or something. That feels like taking a shit in your system directories and you'll never be able to clean it all up after a short while.

bitmasher98• 1 month ago

I’m not on Arch Linux, but I am on NodeJS a lot, which frequently suffers from similar types of attacks.

Who is doing package management right these days? Who is doing it securely?

graemep2• 1 month ago

Arch is fine if you do not use AUR. If you use AUR check everything.

Most distros are too. All the big distros have pretty good track records.

fooqux3• 1 month ago

The AUR is user supported and thus malware sneaks into packages all the time, although admittedly not to this scale. Still, it's pointedly not secure and has always had "here be dragons" signs plastered all around it.

bitmasher98• 1 month ago

That’s not so much an example of who is using best practices, as it is an example of who is using worst practices.

halfcat• 1 month ago

Who is doing package management right these days? Who is doing it securely?

QBASIC. When you need a package you type it in from a magazine. Virtually anything you could ever need is only 1-12 weeks away.

vunderba• 1 month ago

QuickBasic, the commercial version of QBASIC, also supported BI files. These could be used to bundle shared code for things like high-precision timers, interrupt usage, etc.

anon70002• 1 month ago

There are definitely LTS distros where the official packages are not updated ASAP. Npm lets package authors publish new versions to all users immediately. Anything that doesn’t allow that is better. Some distros only incorporate patch/security updates for example.

AUR is worse, in that there may not be official authors and you can take over releases of a package. Like, you’ll have random users publishing the release for some application that doesn’t have their own Arch release. And if that user disappears, someone else may take it over

tobyhinloopen2• 1 month ago

Min Release Age of 7-30 days covers the majority of potential issues with 0 effort.

All major Node package managers should support it by now.

Prom was the best IIRC, yarn second, but even npm is catching up

bitmasher98• 1 month ago

We’re using an internal package repository that acts as a gateway to the public package repositories, except it can have custom rules such as “min release age 30 days”, and can also give logs about which projects have actually downloaded a specific version.

It’s so much overhead and auditing to enforce compliance across the thousands of node microservices though.

landdate4• 1 month ago

Running external code will always be a risk. Even if it is not intended to be malicious it could still have issues that compromise security.

Read the source. If you don't have the time then you shouldn't run the software.

bitmasher98• 1 month ago

By “external code” do you mean code that is not written by yourself or the organization you are working in?

The Linux Kernel has 40 million lines of code, I don’t have the time to read that so I guess I better not use it.

dist-epoch2• 1 month ago

It's a lost battle.

Everything will need to be run in a VM separated from your main desktop which should have your data and a minimal amount of apps.

Qubes OS was ahead of it's time.

simoncion• 1 month ago

Who is doing package management right these days? Who is doing it securely?

The malware was limited to package sources that I understand to be disabled by default, if you're using Arch Linux. These package sources carry clear warnings that the packages they provide are controlled by third-parties and entirely unvetted by the distro maintainers. [0][1]

If your assertion is that any package management system that permits the installation of packages that aren't vetted by the maintainers of the -er- OS that uses that package management system is "not doing it securely", then the only one that's even vaguely "doing it securely" is Apple's iOS.

I'm of the opinion that permitting users of a general-purpose computer to install arbitrary software is a good thing, and is pretty much the entire point of a general-purpose computer. I'd call computers that make that effectively impossible "appliances". There's very definitely a place for appliances, [2] but seeking to turn every computer into an appliance is massively destructive.

[0] <https://aur.archlinux.org/>

[1] <https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_User_Repository>

[2] Reliable computers that you never have to think about because they simply never fail to perform the useful tasks they were designed to do are great.

Induane2• 1 month ago

I think something about the node ecosystem makes it particularly vulnerable. Maybe it's the insane "dry" ethos. Or something else.

Nothing I have ever used has a comparable dependency tree nightmare.

bitmasher98• 1 month ago

I think most ecosystems have more batteries included than node.

matheusmoreira3• 1 month ago

Linux distributions are. They all have maintainers who vet packages and take responsibility for them. Arch Linux does too. The inherent untrustworthiness of the AUR was always made explicit by the Arch Wiki and the culture surrounding it, unlike programming language package managers like npm and pip.

bitmasher98• 1 month ago

Having trusted community members vet packages is a good system, but how much does it really scale?

1. The whole point of the AUR is that the demand for packages outstrips the volunteer effort to provide secure packages.

2. There are about a dozen major package systems for Linux, with a lot of duplicated effort in packaging the same software for slightly different systems in slightly different formats.

w4yai2• 1 month ago

"linux has no malware, windows bad boooh"

dist-epoch2• 1 month ago

"linux has a central package manager with every app that you need, so you don't need to install random apps from random websites like on windows"

w4yai2• 1 month ago

central

That will end badly at some point

rvz• 1 month ago

Who's on Arch Linux btw?

mkayokay• 1 month ago

So from a quick read, it seems it installed "atomic-lockfile", "js-digest" or "lockfile-js" from npm. A list of affected packages is here [1].

Didn't find any quick info on how to check a system, so I ran the following command to find foreign packages and some date related infos:

pacman -Qmi

Check the output against the list of affected packages.

Then, you can also grep for those files in various locations: > grep -rl "atomic-lockfile" / --include="package.json" --include="package-lock.json"

grep -rl "atomic-lockfile" ~/.npm 2>/dev/null
grep -i "atomic-lockfile" /var/log/pacman.log 2>/dev/null

Don't know if the packages delete themself after they run. I just wanted to provide some basic commands, as all the other infos I found didn't provide any help.

[1] https://md.archlinux.org/s/SxbqukK6IA

jeroenhd• 1 month ago

The attacker used at least three Node dependencies in the attack, just checking for atomic-lockfile is not enough. The names js-digest and lockfile-js were also used, and at some point the attacker switched to bun instead of npm.

DavideNL• 1 month ago

Also see: https://github.com/lenucksi/aur-malware-check

stefan_• 1 month ago

I love that even when trying to put malware into Arch Linux AUR, the malware is still distributed through NPM. Legendary platform.

shlip• 1 month ago

Here is how I did it :

Get a list of installed packages originating from AUR using 'yay' :

  yay -Qam > packages_aur.last

Get list from https://md.archlinux.org/s/SxbqukK6IA# :

  curl https://md.archlinux.org/s/SxbqukK6IA/download > compromised.txt

then :

  grep -wFf compromised.txt packages_aur.last

should spit out the packages that are in both files, hence were compromised at some point, I guess.

galleywest2002• 1 month ago

Thank you for this! I only had two on my system, thank goodness. I have uninstalled both.

libgdata 0.18.1-5 qt5-3d 5.15.18-1

quertyrecord742• 1 month ago

How did emacs-magit got affected? It does not have any javascript to my knowledge

landdate4• 1 month ago

It was bad enough when finding out more than 400 AUR packages for Arch Linux users had been infected with malware but now that number has risen to around 900 a few hours ago and now in the end at more than 1,500 user-contributed packages.been infected with malware

I never had a need for the AUR.

If I want a package not in the official repository I build it myself or if it has a binary release I will download it. this way i don't have to use root when building and can have program installed locally just for a single user which is how it should be anyway for most desktop use cases.

At least in this way there is one less level of possible malicious code insertion in developer -> user, vs develeper -> maintainer -> user.

NekkoDroid2• 1 month ago

this way i don't have to use root when building

`makepkg` will actively refuse to run if you are invoking it as root (unless you specifically invoke it with something like `env EUID=123 makepkg ...`).

and can have program installed locally just for a single user which is how it should be anyway for most desktop use cases.

I do wish pacman would support a user level installations. It will refuse to install packages as non-root (which you can go around by using user namespaces and mapping yourself to root).

landdate4• 1 month ago

Maybe I used imprecise wording. Not root, but must be part of sudoers. Or am I misunderstanding how the process works? Don'tWhenever I have installed a package from aur with yay it requires user being part of sudoers.

28304283409234• 1 month ago

Could we be heading towards a world where it's just more secure to write inhouse software again, only now with AI agents? Not closed source per se, but 'own source'?

dontfeedthemac• 1 month ago

this

jl62• 1 month ago

The endgame is to generate a binary image for an entire single-purpose OS/unikernel that does exactly and only what you require of it. No source to open or close.

ianburrell• 1 month ago

The build process is just as vulnerable.

iknowstuff• 1 month ago

Seems cheaper (and so far more robust) to have an agent audit downloaded code

Gigachad3• 1 month ago

It's more likely we will move to a world where desktop OSs have a security model like ios/android so malicious software can't steal your data.

shevy-java• 1 month ago

While this makes Arch Linux look bad right now, I recall how many years ago Gentoo was leading the pack with regards to having many clever people on board. Then came Arch Linux and eventually it put Gentoo as a second tier distribution. Arch has a lot of momentum; I myself am using Manjaro right now, primarily because it makes many things - including compiling from source - simple. As simple as Slackware, before Slackware fossilized (it's still alive of course, but just look at the most recent ISO release, then you'll understand the problem; when a distribution is no longer able to release .iso files, then it is in my book dead).

BoingBoomTschak• 1 month ago

Arch has always been script kiddie tier compared to Gentoo lol.

sunshine-o• 1 month ago

This is something that worries me with a distribution like Alpine Linux.

It is hard to avoid a package like chromium [0] or firefox which are in the "community" repo. Now have fun check it at every update, this is not practically feasible.

For the web browser one can say we should use Flatpak anyway but there are a lot of other apps like sway from the community repo that cannot be flatpaked.

- [0] https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/edge/community/x86_64/c...

Lyngbakr• 1 month ago

But the community repo in Alpine is vetted and reviewed unlike AUR, which is a wild west.

fooqux3• 1 month ago

For those worried, I found a repo with a collection of up-to-date scripts and package lists to help check for any infections: https://github.com/lenucksi/aur-malware-check

reedlaw2• 1 month ago

I did the malware check using Claude, providing it with the same list (https://md.archlinux.org/s/SxbqukK6IA), and it did essentially the same things as this script does to verify. So either way should do the trick.

fooqux3• 1 month ago

I think, for this, I'll trust something community verified and not the potential hallucinations of an AI. But we all put our trust in something I suppose. Glad you're clean.

Simulacra• 1 month ago

This is my fear with Linux and privacy - malware that leaks private data while using ie Tor, or other "anonymous" programs.

roboslone• 1 month ago

How is it Linux-specific?

1vuio0pswjnm7• 1 month ago

What perecentage of Arch users compile the kernel and userland software from source

What Linux distribution^1 has the highest percentage of users who compile from source

Is it Gentoo

1. Besides Linux from Scratch

tmtvl• 1 month ago

I'd expect no more than a fraction of a percent of Arch users compile the kernel and userland from scratch.

Gentoo may not have the highest percentage of users who compile from source because there's binary packages available now. Maybe Exherbo, Source Mage, or Lunar may have the highest percentage outside of LFS.

smetannik• 1 month ago

I might be wrong, but this situation seems like a signal of desktop Linux adoption growth

aftbit3• 1 month ago

Has anyone from the AUR team (such as that is) published a retrospective yet? This was some impressively fast firefighting but in all honesty, it seems like some changes are needed, either in AUR policies or in the wrappers.

I should be able to set a minimum package age just like I can with pnpm.

Orphaned packages should not be adoptable by just anyone. Maybe there should even be a global rate limit on this as a sign of attack.

Someone or something should vuln-scan these packages as they're published, as a number of companies do for NPM now. That would likely have found these pretty quickly.

Most of these are not changes to be made by the AUR maintainers, but rather by packaging helpers and 3rd parties.

TingPing• 1 month ago

There is no official tool to download aur repos, so that’s up to whatever you do.

aftbit3• 1 month ago

I've used three in my career as an Arch user:

yaourt

yay

paru

https://github.com/Morganamilo/paru/issues/1563

gavinhungry• 1 month ago

I should be able to set a minimum package age just like I can with pnpm.

I recently worked up a patch [1] for pakku [2], after being inspired by pnpm.

[1] https://github.com/gavinhungry/patches/blob/main/pakku/pakku...

[2] https://github.com/zqqw/pakku

whateverboat2• 1 month ago

Better would be to namespace AUR packages. That way, ownership is not lost and we don't need orphaning at all.

no-name-here• 1 month ago

Are you suggesting like <package-name>.packaged-by.joe-Schmoe ? And then if Joe Schmoe abandons it, people should instead switch to <package-name>.packaged-by.Abe-Lincoln etc?

embedding-shape21• 1 month ago

Orphaned packages should not be adoptable by just anyone. Maybe there should even be a global rate limit on this as a sign of attack.

Why not? I agree some limits should be added, but also shouldn't be too limited, then lots of things that could be properly maintained, won't. Maybe limit adoption to one package a month or something, to users registered since some date. But no one has automatic (& unreviewed) updates applied to their locally installed AUR packages (that'd be utterly bananas) so the attack vector is already pretty small here.

cookiengineer• 1 month ago

Someone or something should vuln-scan these packages as they're published, as a number of companies do for NPM now. That would likely have found these pretty quickly.

No. It wouldn't have. That's the whole point of the miasma worm, because it changes too fast in its signatures and helper methods. The encrypted malware implant uses a changing AES-128-GCM key that's used to decrypt the payload, and that key is per-where-it-is-uploaded on GitHub. The code itself is dynamically renamed in its methods, re-used shuffled offsets for encrypted symbols, among other things. It's a mutating malware and the worst enemy from tools that rely on signatures.

Ironically, APT28/29 is somewhat relying on Microsoft being too slow to auto block users and repositories on GitHub that are the C2 infrastructure. Think about that for a second what this implies for your cyber strategy.

By the time you're able to scan signatures or "strings" you're already playing a cat and mouse game with a fully automated botnet, which you will never win. The only other ones I've observed during the last week that seem to be able to track this malware implant's changes were socket.dev. ALL other supply chain tools didn't even know about Miasma and re-invented it as a new campaign. They didn't have the skilled enough people nor toolchain to reverse the malware payload quickly enough to be able to keep up every 24h when they push out a new adapter for another ecosystem.

By fully automated I mean they're already using the credentials they stole less than 48 hours ago from a different package ecosystem, because the email addresses and names etc keep appearing from people who likely didn't even understand the impact of this self-spreading worm.

And having an IOC that checks for, let's say, any package that depends on bun won't help either because the malware will just use external means to re-download it. See the second PyPi campaign, where they just changed the dropper to use compressed WHL files and the setup.pth files that are auto-executed to download the dropper. They changed this after the PyPi maintainers flagged the first wave of malware droppers from the RedHat campaign.

As long as the package managers in those ecosystems aren't fully rewritten from scratch to accomodate for chroots, sandboxes, network and domain logs that are _only allowlistable per entry_ this won't change, and will stay being a feasible malware deployment strategy for supply chain attacks.

Repo for Mitigation Tool (I'm human so I play catch 21 with an LLM powered botnet) [1] ... Tech details in the blog post [2]

Also this is a problem across all package managers. Composer is also affected. Rubygems is also affected. NPM is also affected. PyPi is also affected. Go is also affected.

Nobody is talking about this, and I think this should be more openly discussed how much negligence and external trust we put in package managers in general. This really needs to change.

[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/antimiasma

[2] https://cookie.engineer/weblog/articles/malware-insights-mia...

aftbit3• 1 month ago

With this _actual_ attack, it would have been trivial to detect. The signature was:

1. Orphaned package adopted

2. Has post-install hook added

3. Which uses npm or bun

Yes, you're right - detecting this could have led to a more sophisticated attack. Security is always a cat and mouse game. The purpose isn't to stop every attack - it's to raise the costs for attackers and the visibility for defenders.

Any attacker who wants to attack 1000s of packages is going to necessarily leave some signatures, unless they're extremely careful. If they change one thing but not another, you can tie them both together.

Think of this like email anti-spam. It hasn't gotten rid of spam, but it has made it much more expensive to operate.

Combine this with a minimum package age to give the scanners time to run and humans time to inspect, and the ecosystem as a whole gets much more secure.

0x59• 1 month ago

looks like I installed a package 3 weeks before it was comprised. I try to limit surface area as much as possible, and this package seemed to be required for a project I'm working on. (turns out it wasn't, but i didn't know that yet)

scarlehoff• 1 month ago

I like the aur wrappers for the convenience, but if I've already limited my AUR consumption quite a bit, I think from now on all aur updates will be manual.

One thing programs like yay could do though is to tie the packages to the maintainer. If the maintainer changes, it should be treated as a completely separate package. Not a perfect solution, but could avoid a few automatic upgrades.

beej715• 1 month ago

There are 15k orphaned packages on AUR. I just adopted 3 rarely-updated ones this morning (sorting by most popular) and got them built. If you're using an orphaned package, consider adopting it so the baddies can't.

quertyrecord742• 1 month ago

Where can i find the source diff that has the origins of the malware. Slashdot reported it has been delted. I would love to see the diff.

eviks• 1 month ago

It will be under control when the underlying issue is fixed

jzer0cool• 1 month ago

I understand this was AUR. AUR or not could someone share their steps installing any package? How to ensure package you are installing (and deps) are not malware? Because installed (bad package) seems difficult to really undo.

snvzz• 1 month ago

It is safe to assume that at least one actual Arch developer was compromised by this.

The followup attack on Arch itself is not going to be pretty.

Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Packages

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