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silver_suntoday at 6:12 PM3 repliesview on HN

But if an attacker can put arbitrary code into your .bashrc, you are already executing arbitrary malicious code.


Replies

nickjjtoday at 9:58 PM

Yep, but pretty much every single piece of software you've installed on your system can read and write files to your home directory in a silent way without root, and that's where your most important files are on a desktop machine (API tokens, secrets, client projects, etc.).

I have my own opinionated Arch / niri set up and there's 1155 packages installed. That's 1155 opportunities for a package to be compromised. This is also why I try very hard to avoid the AUR and only use it as a last resort (I use 2 packages from it). It doesn't guarantee safety but the official Arch package repos do seem to have more checks and bounds vs the AUR.

inigyoutoday at 6:29 PM

Same if an attacker can run arbitrary docker commands.

dist-epochtoday at 9:27 PM

but not as root