CameronDev, 1 year ago

You have probably invested a lot of time and effort into this, so please take this as constructive criticism.

Your security systems are probably not going to be sufficient, for a whole number of reasons.

Script Voting

The general public is not able to appropriately audit shell scripts. This extends even to sysadmins and more technical people. The people who can properly audit scripts are a minority, and they may not even be amongst your user base. Anyone who gets a script that “does its job” is going to upvote it as fine, because they may not even be aware of its malicious side effects.

Scripts will naturally need to evolve over time, so script updates will be a normal part of your system. Will the votes reset for new versions? Is there anything stopping someone uploading farming votes with valid scripts, and then backdoor the script once it gets sufficiently popular?

Is there any form of vote manipulation prevention planned? If not, bad actors can create an army of accounts and upvote their malicious content. Can you remove a users votes if they are found to be acting maliciously? Will it even be possible for you to tell the difference between a naive user who doesn’t understand the maliciousness of the script, versus an account actively increasing the rating of a bad package?

User Reputation

This seems easy to game as well. Upload a host of valid scripts, gain reputation, and then when ready, upload malicious scripts.

Collaboration

Allowing non-maintainers to edit and upload scripts seems like a wildly bad idea. There must be some level of maintainer approval for that right? Still will have the same issues, easy for someone to build trust on a script repo and then exploit it when it suits them.

None of these issues are unique to your site, pypi, dockerhub etc have all hit these issues in the past.

I think the only real answer is to have very strong human moderation, but I fear that if your site takes off, the workload will rapidly spiral out of control. Otherwise, interesting idea, Good Luck!