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Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

It's better to tell people 'clone this repo and run this script'? I'm pretty sure people have exactly the same chance of auditing it.

curl | sh is slightly problematic from untrusted servers that might change the script depending on whether or not it's piped to a shell, but from gitlab I just don't see a difference.

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Of course, it's better, because we can link to specific commit by sha256 hash, which is way more secure.

You can do that with a direct link too: bash <(curl -s https://gitlab.com/grownetics/devops/raw/ef053050065c4928714...)

No, you can't. Nothing will check SHA256 of a malware downloaded in this way, so nothing will stop malware from owning your host. To check, just put "127.0.0.1 gitlab.com" into your /etc/hosts and try to serve your own file from your URL. Git will detect this, curl will not.

Yes, try it. Unless something has changed drastically curl still checks that certificates are valid.

It looks like you assume that SSL guarantees correctness of the file.

First, I had experience with substituted SSL certificates (by our government, at revolution), when errors were reported by Chrome only due to certificate pinning for Google services.

Second, site can be hacked and replaced directly at the site.

When your threat level is government agencies then, sure, you have issues. But git wouldn't solve anything, unless you have a way to verify the hash or signature.

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