this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
404 points (97.2% liked)
Technology
59287 readers
5776 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You'd be surprised how well someone who wants to can camouflage their package to look legit.
True. You can't always be 100% sure. But a quick check for download counts/version count can help. And while searching for it in the repo, you can see other similarly named packages and prevent getting hit by a typo squatter.
Despite, it's not just for security. What if the package you're installing has a big banner in the readme that says "Deprecated and full of security issues"? It's not a bad package per say, but still something you need to know
*per se
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/per_se
Oh, TIL
Edit: *YourWeb
Yeah, I’m confused on what the intent of the comment was. Apart from a code review, I don’t understand how someone would be able to tell that a package is fake. Unless they are grabbing it from a. Place with reviews/comments to warn them off.
the first most obvious sign is multiple indentical packages, appearing to be the same thing, with weird stats and figures.
And possibly weird sizes. Usually people don't try hard on package managing software, unless it's an OS for some reason.
Unless you’re cross checking every package, you’re not going to know that there are multiple packages. And a real package doesn’t necessarily give detailed information on what it does, meaning you can easily mistake real packages as fake when using this as a test.
The real answer is to not trust AI outputs, but there is no perfect answer to this since those fake packages can easily be put up and sound like real ones with a cursory check.
depends on how you integrate it i suppose. A system that abstracts that is pretty awful.
At the very least, you should be weary of there being more than one package, without explicit reason for such.
we just experienced this with LZMA on debian according to recent reports. 2 years of either manufactured dev history, or one very, very weird episode.
That’s what my ex wife used to say