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?
What’s stopping any Makefile, build script, or executable from running
rm -rf ~? The correct answer is “nothing”. PPAs are similarly open, things are a little safer if you only use your distro’s default package sources, but it’s always possible that a program will want to be able to delete something in your home directory, so it always has permission.Containerized apps are the only way around this, where they get their own home directory.
Don’t forget your package manager, running someone’s installer as root
It’s roughly the same state as when windows vista rolled out UAC in 2007 and everything still required admin rights because that’s just how everything worked…but unlike Microsoft, Linux distros never did the thing of splitting off installs into admin vs unprivileged user installers.