Hacker News Reader

Comment by lrvick | Hacker News Reader

If it is just a few curl and openssl commands, why make a user install hundreds of megs of python deps just to ultimately call mostly openssl commands anyway

One of the biggest risks today is supply chain attacks. The more dependencies you have, the more people you are giving the ability to tamper with your critical code paths.

View on HN

I saw the following programs whil skimming the code:

awk, grep, curl, getent, sudo, mkdir, mv, ln, cat, rm, openssl, touch

Most of these have around 10 dependencies on libs.

Don't misunderstand me. I have nothing against the script. I just don't like the argument that bash is better because it has no dependencies.

The OS itself depends on many libs ;-)

The only things that are a bit heavy in the list are openssl and curl. Still, they are relatively self-contained tools, nothing to do with the dependency hell of certbot.

busybox, openssl, curl. Done. :)

Wouldn't this bash script be just as susceptible to supply chain attacks? What dependencies does openssl, cURL, sed, grep, awk, mktemp pull in, and could it be vulnerable to attack like we saw with xz?

I think the point is to minimize the total attack surface on a system. If the bash script only depends on programs like those you list, which Linux distros package as default anyway, the shell script has not introduced any new dependencies on your system.

> Wouldn't this bash script be just as susceptible to supply chain attacks? What dependencies does openssl, cURL, sed, grep, awk, mktemp pull in, and could it be vulnerable to attack like we saw with xz?

All the packages listed are already probably installed on your system, so you have to worry about their integrity already (your system package manager (RPM, Deb) probably leverages them).

Something like Certbot pulls in dependencies on top of what your system already has, whereas Dehydrated or Acme.sh use tools that you already have to worry about anyway because they're part of the base OS.

I’m pretty sure every open source repository ever created is vulnerable to “an attack like we saw with xz,” and by that I mean a labyrinthine, multi-year effort involving highly sophisticated exploits combined with psychological manipulation, coordinated sock-puppets, global actors, and deep intrigue—to the extent that it’s absurd to cite as a threat that “dependency management” can meaningfully prevent.

Absolutely there is still supply chain risk there. But less risk in 3 dependencies than 300.

3? You think you underestimate the number of libraries your software uses.

I actually full source bootstrapped a Linux distribution from zero recently. Most distros have a lot of dependencies you do not need.

In this case you only actually need curl, openssl, and busybox. Those depend on at least a small libc implementation and a kernel but those are certainly already present.

Coreutils or busybox is probably already installed too. Still, I will grant the requirement of musl and a linux kernel since we are being pedantic or maybe talking about an embedded linux use case, so 5 deps total to boot from metal and get a cert.

To be fair I would never actually ship openssl or busybox in a real embedded project. Would probably write a simple standalone binary using the standard library of Go or something.

How is that in any way realistic? Most people don't bootstrap Linux systems. And just because it is pre-installed doesn't make it safe. Most software on a modern Linux distribution is dynamically linked to several libraries which might depend on other libraries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com