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Comment by SkiFire13 | Hacker News Reader

To be honest the limited popularity of F-Droid also helps it be less targetted by bad actors. If it was more popular I would bet the situation would surely be different

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This argument can be refuted by considering Debian repositories. No malware exists there despite it being a good target. It's the FLOSS that solves the malware problem, with a bit of moderation.

I'd argue OSS isn't sufficient on its own and that I suspect moderation only plays a small role. I think it's primarily the separation of roles. For a complete outsider whose only interest is exploiting users publishing a sufficiently popular piece of software and also gaining the ability to add things to the debian repos is a huge barrier. You'd have to invest years of work to do both of those things and then hope that no one happened to notice anything before it was too late.

Of course the FLOSS aspect adds an additional hurdle that this popular piece of software will have to somehow avoid having much of a contributor community around it since that would greatly increase the risks of your malicious changeset being reviewed. I guess what happened with XZ was about the best case scenario that an attacker could realistically hope for.

There were a few mishaps with PyPI and npm - including in the past week and even today. Not sure if those meet your criteria of FLOSS, but if it does I wouldn't call it solved.

Yeah but supply chain attacks like that can hit literally anything. Debian repos, Play store, an individual publishing on his own website, it's all vulnerable.

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