I haven’t heard a peep about the security status of AUR since the headlines about malware injections into thousands of packages. I’ve ensured that none of my installed software is affected by the attack (to the best of my ability), but I’ve held off on my regular yay -Syu since then. What has you all done to keep your machine updated but clean?
And is there any update from AUR maintainers that the situation is under control? Most of my installed AUR packages simply don’t exist in the official Arch repos, so if not I’d have to look for other sources.
What is it you look for in the diffs more specifically?
The first thing to check is that the software is being downloaded from the correct place. Look for additional downloads and make sure they’re legit. Look for obfuscated code. If you’re not sure, ask.
Not that it is a replacement to doing it manually, but if I were to write a script to look at “important” pieces, what should I be grepping?
You need to look at all the changes or if you are installing it, the whole package build file.
Anything that could compromise your security, privacy, anonymity or safety.
You have to have some expectations and understandings of what the PKGBUILD for the package should be doing and look for something out of the ordinary. The upstream repo will usually have packaging instructions in its readme or wiki which should be reflected in the PKGBUILD.
In the case of the last incident, the attacker was adding
npmas a dependency so they could executenpm install atomic-lockfile, which was the actual attack. That was a huge red flag because most of the packages had nothing to do with JavaScript.