logo

Can we please stop with curl | sudo bash, PLEASE

Posted by b112 |2 hours ago |7 comments

winstonwinston 37 minutes ago

These are often to install a repository and a package.

The alternative is to run something like rpm -i from_url.rpm to install some package directly. Which is not exactly any different from security perspective.

There is no easy way around this when the software is not in a system repo or without attestation in some way.

late_night_fix an hour ago

The problem isn't pipe, it's the default to blind trust.People will happily audit a PR but won't spend 5 seconds reading a script they're about to run as root.

akagusu an hour ago

Can you please stop trying to control what people do on their computers?

Nobody is forcing anyone to execute the script and usually the script is fully auditable.

jjgreen 2 hours ago[1 more]

This may be considered as critical of Rust, so will be flagged and closed in due course.

rvz an hour ago

100% Agree.

If I were an attacker, this is the easiest way to gain root access, leak env variables and install ransomware on the machine.

Accepting this as the standard way to install software just for convenience over security is just pure ignorance until a massive breach happens.

This even before mentioning flawed standards such as INSTALL.md [0] for agents to curl | sudo bash unattended from a .md file.

[0] https://www.mintlify.com/blog/install-md-standard-for-llm-ex...

krapp 2 hours ago

Not only will we keep doing this, we'll have AI agents do it unsupervised.

aroido-bigcat 2 hours ago

Comment deleted