AURpocalypse now: a look at the recent AUR attacks

The AUR really has been known to be low-hanging fruit for bad actors, which makes it somewhat surprising it took this long for it to be taken advantage of.

I have many opinions regarding this situation, but it mostly doesn't matter. AUR staff and AUR helper developers will figure out what they want to do, hopefully they will find a good approach.

But what I personally take away from this is simply that it has become worth it to target desktop Linux with malware. Or at least, moreso than previously. It is perhaps a good sign in some ways that the desktop is starting to be taken more seriously.

The bad news, of course, is that the Linux desktop is a bit of a train wreck in terms of security hygeine. It's getting better, and Linux does have the advantage of having some powerful primitives to exploit, but the desktop suites come from a totally different world, and I fully expect we'll also see more malware propagated through KDE's New Stuff integration (which goes through Pling.)

In case anyone missed it, the latest version of yay (v13+) supports being able to skip recently added packages through its new Lua extension system https://jguer.github.io/yay/lua.html#upgrade-selection-hooks. You can control the threshold since it's just user configuration now.

A bunch of common yay commands also return back the last updated time of a package thanks to https://github.com/Jguer/yay/pull/2846.

> New user registration was stopped on June 11 and then re-enabled after the project added Anubis to try to foil the attacker's mass account registrations. That did not work

This confuses me - why would a proof-of-work anti-scraping system like Anubis prevent registrations?

Devil's advocate, except partially serious.

This is a good thing, because the warning about checking everything you download from the AUR, which has always existed, is now actually "enforced". People respond to consequences.

I love the smell of npm install malware in the morning.

Well all of those attacks are just supply chain attacks, and it is basically exploiting people's trust. With LLMs, the speed and velocity of pumping out malice raised are now significantly faster.

It is so sad that every goodwill eventually got enshittified as well.

I'll note that OpenSuse also has Packman which a shitton of people enable (for codecs), has also 'one namespace only' an looser policies than the main distro.

I do not think this something you can escape by switching distro.

Note that the AUR attacks were part of the larger miasma worm campaign, gradually trying to gain more control through various package ecosystems since the RedHat prototype campaign.

Mitigation Tool: https://github.com/cookiengineer/antimiasma

Blog Post with details: https://cookie.engineer/weblog/articles/malware-insights-mia...

Despite that official Arch repos weren't affected in this attack, I would not recommend using Arch (or any rolling release distro) for anything that requires security. (Imagine if the xz backdoor targeted Arch...)

An Arch maintainer that I personally know once admitted that he rarely review upstream changes when bumping package versions. He only does that when the build breaks.

I can't blame him for what he did, since it's not reasonable to ask package maintainers to spend all their time on those stuff, especially in this "Age of AI" where more and more software are being aggressively refactored (or rather rewritten) and added more features.

What we can do is choosing a stable distro (like Debian) where packages are more thoroughly reviewed, and apply security practices (such as TOTP, sandboxing browsers and video players, etc.) even though they cause inconvenience.

Who still uses Arch btw after this?

A side note, isn't package maintenance something that can actually be solved to some extent by LLMs? The prompt would be something like "Clone this repo and build this package while building/bundling as few other packages as possible with minimal code changes."

Then set it in a loop on all the packages for a particular system, I don't have experience in package maintenance and would be curious what kind of issues would come up.