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 because there’s very little point. Checking signatures only makes sense if the signatures are distributed in a more secure channel than the actual software. Basically the only time that happens is when software is distributed via untrusted mirror services.
Most software I install via curl | bash is first-party hosted and signatures don’t add any security.
All publishing infrastructure shouldn’t be trusted. Theres countless historical examples of this.
Use crypto. It works.
Crypto is used. It is called TLS.
You have to have some trust of publishing infrastructure, otherwise how do you know your signatures are correct?