Yup, there is a lot of prior art on how to get this wrong :(, and I dont know of any good solutions either. Curation and moderation are probably the best case, but arent bulletproof either.
I raised this not to kill OPs project, but to make sure they go into it eyes open. I personally would be very uncomfortable if my website was being abused to distribute malware, so they deserve to at least be aware of the risks.
Very understandable. And from a security standpoint not necessarily indicitive of anything. A good malicious script would just check its environment first.
Have you considered some form of CI? I.e: Spin up a VM, run the script, reboot, report what changed? Might be a little expensive, but could help auditing?
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!
I’m of the opinion that computer textbooks are out of date the second they are published. That one was published in 2017, so 6 years ago, which is an eternity. It might have some generally useful advice, but in terms of resources, google and online wikis are going to be more up to date (still probably outdated, but less so, and free).
They are literally publically claiming that they have a zero day (or at least a zero day level capability). Google/Apple would be all over it trying to fix it. Cyber security researchers would be all over it as well.
NSA can get away with using 0 days for years because they keep quiet about them, and dont use them frivilously.
Yup, for sure, but while a nation state can risk exploitting a zero day to turn on your microphone, an ad tech company certainly can’t. As soon as it get patched they’d be ruined.
Almost every OS nowadays has some form of microphone detection right? So if this was on, you would be aware of it? And to jump ahead, even google is incentivised to prevent this company listening in, as they are direct competitor.
I wonder if this company is just trying to fleece advertisers with a made up tech? The “Claim your exclusive territory before your competitor” feels like the high pressure tactics that other scams use?
I might go disable the microphone in my TV remote anyway :/