Been saying for years that people need to stop treating the AUR like a repo, when it’s more akin to
curl installscript.sh | bash.Some packages pull files from personal dropbox…
So, better to use a safe language, and use
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs/ | sh- right??
(I copied that from https://rust-lang.org/tools/install/ just a second ago…)
cue RuSt Is ThE fUtUrE people.
But it is a repo. It’s just an unofficial one. I don’t know how you use it without understanding this. It’s not far from perfect, but it is useful.
the problem is exactly the fact that it is a repo; it introduces a layer of unknown between the dev and the user. and the user will unavoidably “trust” it (especially when it’s listed amongst official repos in e.g. the graphical version of Pamac), without understanding the risks.
I have always been nervous about this type of thing happening with the AUR. Thankfully many packages I used to need the AUR for have since added native versions or made flatpaks. I hope AUR users don’t have too many issues from this!
flatpaks arn’t any safer and with how poor the sandbox is handled by 99% of devs. Hell flatpaks have a new issue every other month. Its almost more often to see a new flatpak problem then aur problem.
Its literally no safer in reality sure on paper its safer but reality has proven that flatpaks just are not some magical fix to this problem.
Hell half the time when flatpaks do have issues they go unaddressed or fixed for months after they are found. While AUR problems get smacked real fucking fast after they are found.
I haven’t heard about all of these flatpak malware incidents.
I agree that Flatpak’s utilization of sandboxing is weaker in practice than is marketed. I get that many apps ship with home/host filesystem access instead of granular permissions, but it does provide meaningful isolation when used correctly.
I think a lot of people are confusing what the AUR actually IS. It is NOT the official package repository used by Archlinux - it’s more like a bunch of community install scripts for stuff that isn’t officially supported yet - for popularity or other reasons.
So for all those people complaining and saying “debian does it better” it’s very likely that you would not even HAVE a package to install and would have to come up with a build script on your own - the AUR allows you to skip this and instead just verify that the script itself isn’t malicious, which is usually fairly obvious.
A lot of people here seem to be under the impression that all of this effort should be abstracted for them - but that’s what you chose when you left windows - a system that you control intimately with a necessitation to actually do some upkeep yourself because a giant company isn’t doing it for you.
In other words. RTFM and stop expecting other people fix all your problems for you, because that’s exactly how windows got to how it currently is.
I haven’t been on my PC that much this week, just Friday night. And our D&D group uses Discord so I needed to make sure it was up to date to ensure it would run. I typically just do a, “sudo pacman -Syu” and that seems to update what I need.
If that is the only thing I did with the PC during this window, is there any concern?
Probably not. The article says that most of it seems to have come from orphaned stuff in the AUR that the threat actors took ownership of via the legit process, then modified to pull down malicious NPM packages when someone went to install them.
So if your Discord package is well maintained you probably have nothing to worry about.
Nah, you’re fine the Discord package(https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/discord/) is in the official repo and it was not affected at all. The only people who should worry are those using AUR helpers to install packages without checking the PKGBUILD
1500+ now https://md.archlinux.org/s/SxbqukK6IA
Welp if nothing else at least this has helped me to replace jack1 with jack2 (out of my 4 total Aur packages)
I was starting to get too confident in AUR. Thankfully I wasn’t affected. Just replaced all possible AUR packages to their respective Arch and Flatpak alternatives, with exception of very few or from the ones I had no option. But will definitely check before updating them, and will only install AUR packages as a last resort.
Have a look into the Guix package manager. It works fine on top of Arch, and Guix has 31,000 packages now. Great for cross-language development and also suitable for early sharing of projects. npm support is a bit weak though, but packages written in Python, Rust, or functional languages are well represented.
Thats like nix packager, right? Looks interesting to layer on top. Says they are all reproducible builds which is nice.
Yes, Guix is initially a clone of Nix and has still remains of shared code (the build daemon).
Differences:
- Guix packages are defined in a Scheme dialect called Guile, a nice minimal functional language
- Guix was created as a GNU project and stresses the importance of free software with strong copyleft
- strong focus on long-term reproducibility and capability of tracking the sources
- everything is built from source
- very good and well organized documentation
Is this the first time AUR has been compromised to this degree?
Given how changes are often unvetted, I am surprised this hasn’t occurred before.
deleted by creator
A lot of the AUR is just build scripts for GitHub repos …
Or dropbox
Expecting user to inspect install scripts is retarded. And this is the result.
So what would the alternative be? If the resources or desire don’t exist to make a package official, how else would you install it?
You’re missing the point entirely. I’m talking about inspecting the scripts not about making packages
Sorry if I was unclear. You usually don’t inspect the install scripts for official packages since you put the trust in the official team. You don’t trust(or at least shouldn’t) AUR packages, hence you should inspect the install script for those packages. I don’t really see what the alternative would be.
Well, the alternative would be for moderation team to inspect them, with clear signaling of which scripts are trusted and which aren’t.
But this is exactly what the top comment of Cease talks about: There is no moderation team. You seem to think that it is the job of the maintainers of the Arch Linux distribution is to vet and review the AUR packages. But they take care for the - much more widely used - Arch distro packages and are busy with this. They have enough to do. And the AUR packages are not part of the Arch distro.
The AUR is basically a server where users can store their own packages so that others can use it. As its name says: Arch User Repository.
There is no moderation team.
And that’s why it’s fundamentally shit idea on so many levels. Instead of having one person to inspect let’s make every single user expert or not to inspect every package each individually. This is fucking retardation at its finest.
But who would do that? Do you have security expertise and are volunteering to do that?
The option is to not have it
ahahaha such a shit take
There IS one person that inspect the code for everyone, that’s the package maintainer. But it’s a random voluntary contribution from some random person who you should not blindly trust. That’s the point of the AUR, one person makes it significantly easier to install for everyone. The point is to be better than installing directly from somewhere like GitHub. For actual good moderation there are officials repos
if you dufus can’t read a pkgbuild DON’T USE THE AUR might also keep the shell closed
Then dont use arch and the aur easy as that
Sounds like something a fedora user would say.
Are you aware how github works, or open source development in general ?
Some users are developers, too.
Some people write code, others may try it out, and a few of the latter might help with developing it. And some of these efforts become popular.
That’s how we have Linux or KDE.
That’s why Sourceforge was such a big win, why Ubuntu has launchpad and ppas, and why Arch has AUR.
It is all based on open sharing.
And of course you can opt to not run code that you don’t know, or don’t understand , or don’t trust.
Wow, I have 229 AUR packages installed but none of them is on the infected list!
Am I just lucky?
Check again, it’s around 1500+ packages now.
How do you guys check against that list? Especially when people have so many aur packages. I simply searched the list for each package manually but I only have 5. Do you write scripts?
So far I’ve just checked the diff of every package update. But with that many, I think we should maybe start using using the script provided in the article that you evidently didn’t read.
I read another article before which did not mention the script but only listed all affected packages. So yeah I should read this article :)
typical arch user, doesn’t know how to use grep.
I just did. Still no match. I guess still have some luck left :)
i have a few machines and lots of aur packages and none of mine have a single hit either
Same here. Just checked against the new list with 1937 packages and still don’t have a match.
can i get a link to the list youre using, or where you found it?
I just checked the new list with 1937 infected packages, not a single match. Again, am I just lucky or are all these 1937 packages barely used by people?
Look how every motherfucker complains about arch and the aur but not that their distros blindly use it without contributing back and even suggest to blindly trust it. these same people now complain the aur is to complicated. Never go full retard guys
Tons of clawing at each other’s throats in the comments here, largely declaring one another retarded for their use or misuse of AUR or thanking their lucky stars that none of their packages are on the list (so far), but not much that’s helpful for those less fortunate. Maybe nobody’s saying anything to that end because the article already covered it, but this is the second out of two times I’ve visited cybersecuritynews.com and been stuck in an “Are you a bot?” loop that never ends no matter how much of my browser’s safeguards I peel off.
Here’s what steps I did so far, based on following the links I found in this thread (especially the GitHub comments under one of the links):
-
pacman -Qmin console yielded a list of all the AUR packages that are installed on the system -
CTRL+F the results one-by-one in the apparent most up-to-date list: https://md.archlinux.org/s/SxbqukK6IA
-
I have one on that list, specifically
wine-nine, so I ranbat --style header,snip,changes /var/log/pacman.log | grep wine-ninewhich yielded the following (at the bottom of a very long list of apparent updates I’ve run since installing the OS):
[2026-06-05T20:37:06-0400] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] wine-nine 0.10-1[2026-06-07T21:50:58-0400] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] wine-nine 0.10-1[2026-06-08T20:56:54-0400] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] wine-nine 0.10-1[2026-06-09T21:38:44-0400] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] wine-nine 0.10-1[2026-06-10T21:58:52-0400] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] wine-nine 0.10-1[2026-06-12T20:18:37-0400] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] wine-nine 0.10-1[2026-06-12T20:18:37-0400] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] wine-nine 0.10-1(Like a good little Arch user I’ve been updating pretty frequently)
- Now what?
I saw something that said “check for suspicious processes running as root” but I have no idea what that would look like.
I saw something that said I need to redo all of my passwords and tokens. Any way to check if that’s necessary or should I just assume I’ve been pwn3d?
In using
pacseekI think I’ve discoveredwine-ninehasn’t been modified in the AUR since “2024-12-07 - 15:18:31 (UTC)” so can I relax a bit? I’m currently going through my list of AUR packages and deciding whether or not I need them as badly as I originally thought. Sadly my distro is one of those that decided to lean on AUR, because most of my list (apart from two) I don’t recognize as something I’ve installed myself.
pacseekwould not let me remove the following AUR packages (which thankfully are not in the list (yet))::: removing electron41-bin breaks dependency 'electron41' required by deltachat-desktop- an encrypted chat application I installed (not via AUR) I suppose I could find an alternative for:: removing electron41-bin breaks dependency 'electron41' required by freetube- a YouTube frontend I installed (not via AUR) I suppose I could find an alternative for:: removing libsoup breaks dependency 'libsoup' required by webkit2gtk- no idea whatwebkit2gtkis
I only just now realized that chaotic-aur is probably just as problematic as AUR, both in my decision to use packages at all as well as my searching the list of compromise packages, yes? I have tons more packages under that, most of which I think came with the OS.
-
I wish Arch packages as much in their repos as Debian.
I think there was a word missing.
To respond to what I think you were saying, this event happened in the Arch User Repository, and not the official repositories.
Arch is very clear that they are not responsible for what goes on in the AUR. For example on https://aur.archlinux.org/ :The Debian equivalent would be somewhere between extrepo and PPAs.
I think the comment makes sense, if more packages were supported on the main Arch repos there would be less of a need to use the AUR or Flatpaks.
There are definitely some big gaps on the Arch repos (web browsers in particular) that I would like to see improved.
You’re right, but web browsers can be pretty brutal to build and they are for sure never going to add -bin versions.
I don’t understand this argument. Isn’t it better to build once and distribute binaries than to make everyone compile it themselves? The vast majority of AUR packages I use are -bin versions.
You don’t get to see the code that way, which is where bad actors thrive. Also it wasn’t compiled for exactly your system.
Yep an easy agree. Popular browsers like Zen, Helium and (god forbid) Brave should be directly in the official repos. So should be Jellyfin. It just makes sense given that debian repos have far more packages.
maybe i went offtopic but i was comparing the AUR To Debian’s repos, i see that Debian has more packages in its repos(things like Llama-CPP and Open arena is in debian but arch needs the AUR)
thats what i meant
So, I’m totally fine because I always manually install from the AUR? This is more of a problem for people using those AUR helpers that make a package manager out of it, right?
I don’t think it matters how you installed infected AUR packages.
No. If it came from AUR, it doesnt matter the method you used. You should check all the AUR apps you recently updated (from 9th to 12th June), and compare it to the lists. Only AUR though… Arch official repos are not affected by it.
Yeah I had a mild panic before realising that I haven’t actually used aur for anything yet
flatpak has a sandbox
Be careful with relying on it though since it has more holes than swiss cheese due in part to lazy devs who request unesecary permissions & the sandbox being slightly flawed from a security perspective.
A sandbox that has enough protection to be secure also has enough restrictions as to be too annoying to use, and often is useless. Don’t get me wrong, sandboxes can be very good, but only in specific situations. In general you need your applications to be secure without a sandbox.
What do you mean, don’t you love a text editor that can not open any file on your system?
You’re basically describing ed.
It’s a sandbox in the sense that it is a box to keep the sand in one place under normal circumstances. It was never intended to completely prevent sand from being ejected by an unruly child inside of it. Or perfectly keep outside toys from being brought into it if someone tries to do that.
