Submitted 2 days ago by OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml to selfhosted@lemmy.world
The question is simple. I wanted to get a general consensus on if people actually audit the code that they use from FOSS or open source software or apps.
Do you blindly trust the FOSS community? I am trying to get a rough idea here. Sometimes audit the code? Only on mission critical apps? Not at all?
Let’s hear it!
no. ive skimmed through maybe 2 things overall but thats about it. i use too many apps to be able to audit them all and i dont have the proper skills to audit code anyway, and even if i did i would still have to re-audit after every update or every few years. its just not worth the effort
youre taking a chance whether you use closed or open source software, at least with open source there is the option to look through things yourself, and with a popular project theres going to be a bigger chance of others looking through it
no… I do just blindly trust the code.
Let me put it this way: I audit open source software more than I audit closed source software.
I have also looked at the code of one project.
If it’s a project with a couple hundred thousands of downloads a week then no, i trust that it’s been looked at by more savvy people than myself.
If it’s a niche project that barely anyone uses or comes from a source i consider to be less reputable then i will skim it
This
Nah. My security is entirely based on vibes and gambling
YOLO
Based
Hell yeah brother!
Depends on what you mean by “audit”.
I look at the GitHub repo.
Do I read the whole code base? Of course not. But this is way more than I can do with closed source software.
For personal use? I never do anything that would qualify as “auditing” the code. I might glance at it, but mostly out of curiosity. I think the idea that the open-source community is keeping a close eye on each other’s code is a bit of a myth. No one has the time, unless someone has the money to pay for an audit.
My company only allows downloads from official sources, verified publishers, signed where we can. This is enforced by only allowing the repo server to download stuff and only from places we’ve configured. In general those go through a process to reduce the chances of problems and mitigate them quickly.
I’m actually going round in circles with this one developer. He needs an open source package and we already cache it on the repo server in several form factors, from reputable sources …… but he wants to run a random GitHub component which downloads an unsigned tar file from an untrusted source
I know lemmy hates AI but auditing open source code seems like something it could be pretty good at. Maybe that’s something that may start happening more.
This is one of the few things that AI could potentially actually be good at. Aside from the few people on Lemmy who are entirely anti-AI, most people just don’t want AI jammed willy-nilly into everything.
Aside from the few people on Lemmy who are entirely anti-AI
Those are silly folks lmao
most people just don’t want AI jammed willy-nilly into places where it doesn’t belong to do things poorly that it’s not equipped to do.
Exactly, fuck corporate greed!
Daniel Stenberg claims that the curl bug reporting system is effectively DDOSed by AI wrongly reporting various issues. Doesn’t seem like a good feature in a code auditor.
I’ve been on the receiving end of these. It’s such a monumental time waster. All the reports look legit until you get into the details and realize it’s complete bullshit.
But if you don’t look into it maybe you ignored a real report…
‘AI’ as we currently know it, is terrible at this sort of task. It’s not capable of understanding the flow of the code in any meaningful way, and tends to raise entirely spurious issues (see the problems the curl author has with being overwhealmed for example). It also wont spot actually malicious code that’s been included with any sort of care, nor would it find intentional behaviour that would be harmful or counterproductive in the particular scenario you want to use the program.
Having actually worked with AI in this context alongside github/azure devops advanced security, I can tell you that this is wrong. As much as we hate the AI, and as much as people like to (validly) point out issues with hallucinations, overall it’s been very on-point.
Lots of things seem like they would work until you try them.
I’m writing a paper on this, actually. Basically, it’s okay-ish at it, but has definite blind spots. The most promising route is to have AI use a traditional static analysis tool, rather than evaluate the code directly.
That seems to be the direction the industry is headed in. GHAzDO and competitors all seem to be converging on using AI as a force-multiplier on top of the existing solutions, and it works surprisingly well.
It wouldn’t be good at it, it would at most be a little patch for non audited code.
In the end it would just be an AI-powered antivirus.
I’m actually planning to do an evaluation of a n ai code review tool to see what it can do. I’m actually somewhat optimistic that it could do this better than it can code
I really want to sic it on this one junior programmer who doesn’t understand that you can’t just commit ai generated slop and expect it to work. This last code review after over 60 pieces of feedback I gave up on the rest and left it as he needs to understand when ai generated slop needs help
I don’t audit the code, but I do somewhat audit the project. I look at:
I think that catches the worst issues, but it’s far from an audit, which would require digging through the code and looking for code smells.
Same here.
I rely on Debian repo maintainers to do this for me
It’s not feasible. A project can have 10s or 100s of thousand lines of code and it takes months to really understand what’s going on. Sometimes you need domain specific knowledge.
I read through those installers that do a curl gitbub… | bash. Otherwise I do what amounts to a “vibe check”. How many forks and stars does it have? How many contributors? What is the release cycle like?
Contributors is my favorite metric. It shows that there are lots of eyes on the code. Makes it less likely of a single bad actor being able to do bad things.
That said, the supply chain and sometimes packaging is very opaque. So it almost renders all of that moot.
Of course I do bro, who doesnt have 6 thousand years of spare time every time they run dnf update to go check on 1 million lines of code changed? Amateurs around here…
I generally look over the project repo and site to see if there’s any flags raised like those I talk about here.
Upon that, I glance over the codebase, check it’s maintained and will look for certain signs like tests and (for apps with a web UI) the main template files used for things like if care has been taken not to include random analytics or external files by default. I’ll get a feel for the quality of the code and maintenance during this. I generally wouldn’t do a full audit or anything though. With modern software it’s hard to fully track and understand a project, especially when it’ll rely on many other dependencies. There’s always an element of trust, and that’s the case regardless of being FOSS or not. It’s just that FOSS provides more opportunities for folks to see the code when needed/desired.
That’s something along the lines I do as well, but your methods are far more in depth than mine. I just glance around documentations, how active the development is and get a rough idea if the thing is just a single person hobby-project or something which has a bit more momentum.
And it of course also depends on if I’m looking for solutions just for myself or is it for others and spesifically if it’s work related. But full audits? No. There’s no way my lifetime would be enough to audit everything I use and even with infinite time I don’t have the skills to do that (which of course wouldn’t be an issue if I had infinite time, but I don’t see that happening).
depends like for known projecte like curl i wont because i know its fine but if its a new project i heard about i do audit the source and if i dont know the lang its in i ask someone that does
Generally, no. On some cases where I’m extending the code or compiling it for some special case that I have, I will read the code. For example, I modified a web project to use LDAP instead of a local user file. In that case, I had to read the code to understand it. In cases where I’m recompiling the code, my pipeline will run some basic vulnerability scans automatically.
I would not consider either of these a comprehensive audit, but it’s something.
Additionally, on any of my server deployments, I have firewall rules which would catch “calls to home”. I’ve seen a few apps calling home, getting blocked but no adverse effects. The only one I can remember is Traefik, which I flipped a config value to not do that.
I do not. But then again, I don’t audit the code of the closed source software I use either.
I trust the community, but not blindly. I trust those who have a proven track record, and I proxy that trust through them whenever possible. I trust the standards and quality of the Debian organization and by extension I trust the packages they maintain and curate. If I have to install something from source that is outside a major distribution then my trust might be reduced. I might do some cursory research on the history of the project and the people behind it, I might look closer at the code. Or I might not. A lot of software doesn’t require much trust. A web app running in its own limited user on a well-secured and up-to-date VPS or VM, in the unlikely event it turned out to be a malicious backdoor, it is simply an annoyance and it will be purged. In its own limited user, there’s not that much it can do and it can’t really hide. If I’m off the beaten track in something that requires a bit more trust, something security related, or something that I’m going to run it as root, or it’s going to be running as a core part of my network, I’ll go further. Maybe I “audit” in the sense that I check the bug tracker and for CVEs to understand how seriously they take potential security issues.
Yeah if that malicious software I ran that I didn’t think required a lot of trust, happens to have snuck in a way to use a bunch of 0-day exploits and gets root access and gets into the rest of my network and starts injecting itself into my hardware persistently then I’m going to have a really bad day probably followed by a really bad year. That’s a given. It’s a risk that is always present, I’m a single guy homelabbing a bunch of fun stuff, I’m no match for a sophisticated and likely targeted nation-state level attack, and I’m never going to be. If On the other hand if I get hacked and ransomwared along with 10,000 other people from some compromised project that I trusted a little too much at least I’ll consider myself in good company, give the hackers credit where credit is due, and I’ll try to learn from the experience. But I will say they’d better be really sneaky, do their attack quickly and it had better be very sophisticated, because I’m not stupid either and I do pay pretty close attention to changes to my network and to any new software I’m running in particular.
No, so I only use well known widely used open source programs. If I’m doing a code review I’m getting paid to do it.
I don’t have the know how to do so, so I go off of what others have said about it. It’s at-least got a better chance of being safe than closed source software where people are FULLY guessing at if its safe or not, rather than what we have with at-least 1 person having poured over it that doesn’t have ties to the creator.
If I can read it in around an afternoon, and it’s not a big enough project that I can safely assume many other people have already done so, then I will !
But I don’t think it qualifies as “auditing”, for now I only have a bachelor’s in CS and I don’t know as much as I’d like about cybersecurity yet.
I’m unlikely to do a full code audit, unless something about it doesn’t pass the ‘sniff test’. I will often go over the main code flows, the issue tracker, mailing lists and comments, positive or negative, from users on other forums.
I mean, if you’re not doing that, what are you doing, just installing it and using it??!? Where’s the fun in that? (I mean this at least semi seriously, you learn a lot about the software you’re running if you put in some effort to learn about it)
some yes, I’m currently using hyde for hyprland and I’ve been tinkering with almost every script that holds the project together
I do not, but I sleep soundly knowing there are people that do, and that FOSS lets them do it. I will read code on occasion, if I’m curious about technical solutions or whatnot, but that hardly qualifies as auditing.
I do not audit code line by line, bit by bit. However, I do due diligence in making sure that the code is from reputable sources, see what other users report, I’ll do a search for any unresolved issues et al. I can code on a very basic level, but I do not possess the intelligence to audit a particular app’s code. Beyond my ‘due diligence’ I rely on the generosity of others who are more intelligent than and can spot problems.
I run projects inside Docker on a VM away from important data. It allows me to test and restrict access to specific things of my choosing.
It works well for me.
Lol. I download a library or program to do a task because I would not be able to code it myself (to that kind of production level, at least). Of course I’m not gonna be able to audit it! You need twice the IQ to debug a software compared to the one needed to even write it in the first place.
I do sometimes, when I know the tech stack. (I wonder if GitHub Copilot could help in other situations?)
For example, I’ve been learning more about FreshRSS and Wallabag (especially now that Pocket is shutting down).
In any case, with open source, I trust that someone looks at it.
I implicitly trust FOSS more than closed source but because that trust has been earned through millions of FOSS projects.
On occasion, I will dive deep into a codebase especially if I have a bug and I think I can fix it.
You can’t do this with closed source or even source available code because there is no guarantee that the code you have is the code that’s been compiled.
I usually just look for CVEs. The biggest red flag is if there’s 0 CVEs. The yellow flag is if the CVEs exist, but they don’t have a prominent notice on their site about it.
Best case is they have a lot of CVEs, they have detailed notices on their sites that were published very shortly after the CVE was published, and they have an bug bounty program setup.
What if the software is just so flawlessly written that there are not CVEs?
/s
I maintained an open-source app for many years. It leveraged a crypto library but allowed for different algos, or none at all for testing.
Some guy wrote a CVE about “when I disable all crypto it doesn’t use crypto”. So there’s that. It’s the only CVE we got before or during my time.
But even we got one.
doyun@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Nope! Not at all. I don’t think I could find anything even if I tried. I do generally trust OS more than other apps but I feel like I’m taking a risk either way. If it’s some niche thing I’m building from a git repo I’ll be wary enough to not put my credit card info but that’s about it