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?
No it isn’t. What could a Bash script do that the executable it downloads couldn’t do?
It’s not just protection against security, but also human error.
https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and-abbandoned/issues/123
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/20/how-a-steam-bug-once-deleted-all-of-someones-user-data/
Just because I trust someone to write a program in a modern language they are familier in, doesn’t mean I trust them to write an install script in bash, especially given how many footguns bash has.
You’re telling me that you dont verify the signatures of the binaries you download before running them too?!? God help you.
I download my binaries with apt, which will refuse to install the binary if the signature doesn’t match.
By definition nothing
The point you appear to be making is “everything is insecure so nothing is” and the point others are making is “everything is insecure so everything is”