this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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Nice
Good to see one of the two big packaging hubs do something against malware
Apt has done this forever
How does that Help against Malware?
Because if you search Firefox and see a badge that says verified, you can be confident that it was Mozilla that packaged it and added it to FlatHub as opposed to some random scammer.
You can't just upload a App to Flathub. Everythng is reviewed.
It makes it obvious to people whether they are downloading Google Chrome as packaged by Google or as by someone else. That being said, Google Chrome is malware. That being said there is a lot more that needs to be done to truly prevent malware, which will be costly but will hopefully take effect when they've got the budget for it
cough cough snap cough
Snap already marks unverified apps
Yet Ubuntu still recommends installing anything from the terminal if a command was found in a rando unverified snap.
Next step, display the "potential unsafe"-badge next to verified or unverified, that can be found on the same page. In example https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.shiiion.primehack is marked as verified, but if you scroll down you can see the application has full system and data access and is marked as potential unsafe.
Verification doesnt help at all if the source is not trusted. All this says is "upstream developers maintain this package". Unofficial packages can be safe too, like VLC.
It does help prevent actual malware from being downloaded, though, since upstream developers probably won't publish malware on Flathub.
But this is still a half-measure. I don't understand why Red Hat and Canonical don't treat this issue seriously; people on Linux are used to assuming software installed from the repos are safe, and yet Snap and Flatpak are being pushed more and more despite their main repositories being potentially unsafe.
Fedora has their own flatpak repo built from their own rpms and their own runtime. Flathub has more flatpaks though.
Because both Red Hat and Canonical are of the "pay us to care" mindset. If you aren't paying for support, you're a freeloader and need to do your own research.
I mean, that's pretty much all open source software and isn't specific at all to RH/Canonical.
What's provided to you is provided without warranty and you're not automatically entitled to support, etc.
That's not entirely true with Red Hat. There's a lot of work that they've done in the open source community that they haven't shared back. And canonical seems to think this is a good idea.
I'm not really sure what you mean by that. What do you mean they've done a lot of work for the open source community that they haven't shared back?
And what does it have to do with providing software support free of charge?
This unverified badge does not prevent from malware being downloaded. This is a false statement! An upstream developer can have malicious intention and be verified as the upstream developer. This unverified badge only helps identifying its not a modified version by someone else and is guaranteed to be from the original developer. It does not prevent anyone from downloading and installing unverified apps. If that was the goal, then why having unverified apps in the first place on the store? Yes, because its useful. Therefore people will download unverified apps or just blindly trust verified apps.
At the moment his is enough. But if the Flathub store grows, this can be an issue. Look at the Android and ios app stores; there are plenty of apps from original developers with malicious intentions.
I said it helps prevent malware from being downloaded, not that it stops it completely.
That's my point, it does not "help" preventing from malware from being downloaded.
It is reasonable to assume that a verified Flatpak will have a lower chance of containing malware, since initial verification includes manual review (by a Flathub maintainer), and certain changes (like default permissions) also require manual review.
So the way I see it, it does help, but not in a meaningful way.
Flathub is doing more and more, but stuff like hiding
--subset=verifiedis very bad.They simply need to gain critical mass until they can force changes like portals etc.
If you create malware and publish it on flathub, you are the upstream dev. But for sure it helps against duplicate scams.
I can't find it now, but I read that the verification process also includes human review (for the initial verification, not every update), so it should actually prevent "verified" malware (though it does nothing against unverified malware).
Edit: Here's an article with this and more info: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/966187/3ef48792e5e8c71d/
Nice!
Add flathub with
--subset=verifiedand get apps you really need from their .flatpakref files