On Wed, 2013-04-24 at 12:57 -0400, arch-general-request@archlinux.org wrote:

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On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 1:10 PM, Mark E. Lee wrote:

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While building packages on the AUR, I was wondering that except for manual user intervention (by reading the code), I didn't have any other methods of knowing if a package had malware or viruses. Hence, I was wondering if virus scanning via clamav should be called before

On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 06:56:56 PM Daniel Micay wrote: pacman

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installs packages.

-- Mark E. Lee

The PKGBUILD itself is a bash script. If you're running them without reading the code and checking that the sources are from an upstream you trust, you're gonna have a bad time.

There are plenty of packages in the AUR that touch outside of $pkgdir - but most seem to be beginner mistakes in good faith. ClamAV pretty much just detects very common win32 viruses, because it's used on mail servers to *reduce* the number of spread viruses.

If you really feel like scanning the package contents after you've already trusted the PKGBUILD and build scripts, just don't use makepkg -i.

I'd have to agree here, I don't feel much as if it is the duty of the package manager to check for viruses. Furthermore, reinforcing what Daniel said, ClamAV's primary function is to mitigate the spreading of Windows malware. While it would be nice to have some system to screen PKGBUILDs for malicious activity, it is just out of scope. [core], [extra], [multilib], and [community] are for the most part screened upon submission (You can't just throw a package right upstream and into [community] without having someone view it first, thus having an opportunity to spot bad scripts) and the AUR is fairly trustworthy in and of itself. It really is just a matter of trust.

As seen by some malignant Android apps, trust in the developer/maintainer does not always work towards the goals of the end users. Packages downloaded from the main repos or built from the AUR should be scanned for both windows and linux malware to ensure Arch Linux pc's don't become carriers for malware. Pacman would benefit from an additional line of package scanning (not just verifying); it's sort of like a second opinion from another doctor. From, Mark -- Mark E. Lee