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don't suggest curl | bash
http://learn.perl.org/installing/osx.html contains
curl -L http://xrl.us/installperlosx | bash
which is a horrible security anti-pattern.
Yes, it's extremely simple, but we shouldn't be encouraging people to do this without enough warnings to dissuade them. What happens if someone changes where that short link redirects to? What if someone changes the result to do sudo rm -rf /.
Well Ask owns xrl.us and I own the GH installperlosx account...
It has also been like this for years
Happy to add copy saying people should check the source first or something - but it's going to take them a while to do so...
Also this doesn't need (indeed should not be) root user doing it... that kind'a being the point... which might be another thing to clarify I guess
On 15 Jul 2017, at 23:17, Robert [email protected] wrote:
http://learn.perl.org/installing/osx.html contains
curl -L http://xrl.us/installperlosx | bash which is a horrible security anti-pattern.
Yes, it's extremely simple, but we shouldn't be encouraging people to do this without enough warnings to dissuade them. What happens if someone changes where that short link redirects to? What if someone changes the result to do sudo rm -rf /.
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It's less about whether this specific case is good or bad and more about this particular pattern being bad. Ok, it's safe this time. But it might not be next time. What if your github account gets hacked? What if gugod's github ccount gets hacked. Or if they start getting used to this anti-pattern and run it for some other tool?
(Yes, this is nearly exactly as dangerous as downloading any other pre-compiled binary, but for some reason it feels riskier.)
What's wrong with the perl that comes with OSX?
Also: since it's http I don't need to own the endpoints to inject bad stuff in the curl response. If it were https, that would be better, but xrl.us doesn't support https (or at least the cert was failing for me today).
What's wrong with the perl that comes with OSX?
A few things now, apparently: https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=127028
