Obviously installing anything from AUR must be done cautiously and there have always been sketchy (as in improperly built/packaged) packages in the past but seeing actively malicious injections is concerning. I think there are two main problems with AUR: 1. it is a remnant of a slightly more egalitarian era in the open source history when you could generally trust 3rd party code and 2. orphaned packages can be adopted by anyone with their full history and vetting intact.
I think we are well past (1) but (2) could be mitigated by tighter controls on AUR accounts and potentially additional safeguards from AUR helpers. Maybe show a big scary warning if the package has changed owners recently. I know there will still be people that will "y" their way forward but it's better than nothing.
Or just avoid AUR helpers altogether and inspect/build the packages you need yourself from their PKGBUILDs directly.
This campaign is still ongoing. I just got an email that one of my old packages (which hasn't worked for years and was orphaned for a while) was adopted and immediately a malicious commit was pushed. They seem to be using bun instead of npm now, so any npm-based workaround likely isn't effective.
I remember installing an emulator (Mednafen) on Arch Linux about a decade ago. The program failed to run because it was linked against a library my system didn't have. Turns out, the maintainer built the software on his own system and it used a library he had on his system but was not listed in the dependencies.
It is an officially maintained package and I always assumed these were built on a dedicated build server instead of some a random volunteer/home computer. Don't know if Arch still builds the same way but this event scared me enough to switch distros.
Note that pacman supports date locales; searching for '9 Jun' only works in English locales (or locales using similar formatting, I suppose).
After correcting, for me, it flagged "jd-gui", but I had actually installed "jd-gui-bin" about two hours before the compromise. As far as I can tell, I was lucky that I felt lazy that night and went for the -bin package instead of waiting for the source to be compiled.
Always check PKGBUILD and sources, AUR is not to be trusted for the most part. I'm actually more surprised that such compromise hasn't happened earlier.
Just not always on this scale and doesn't always end up on HN.
Similar to how you don't see every npm supply chain attack or malicious github action or similar on HN.
In general you _have to_ manually review every PKGBUILD update by hand (by diff). Everything else is neglect IMHO. Luckily for most packages this is reasonably doable, IFF you trust the upstream sources they fetch from. (As in: Most packages are a small amount of glue between pacman and a upstream source.)
As consequence AUR packages with AUR dependencies are in general "uh..., lets not do it" cases for me, as on one hand the review overhead can be a pain and on the other hand it's easy to make a mistake overlooking a change in AUR dependencies.
Still the policy which allows relatively easy adoption of orphaned packages is IMHO a problem. A adoption should be treated as a new package which just happen to have the same name. (It can be fine to not have that if arch maintainers "bless" the adoption, but IMHO that would only matter for a view very widely used packages which are candidates to be included in the official repo but aren't for e.g. license reasons.)
Installed CachyOS to replace my Win 10 installation a month ago. Not looking back! But yeah this sucks, I've mostly used Ubuntu with apt in the past. Pacman and makepkg felt a bit weird to use in the beginning.
On the bright side you can get quite far without the AUR.
I have 1,135 packages installed. Only 3 top level packages are from the AUR and 2 of those 3 are from the same author, they just happened to split their packages into a client / server architecture.
Be aware of false positives! I found I had two of these packages installed, clang19 and compiler-rt19, but due to my recent laziness in updating my system, mine were still the versions from July 2025 from the official repos before they had relegated them to AUR.
You can check the build and install date with `pacman -Qi <package>`.
I run Arch Linux in a container (within Fedora Silverblue), but my plan for the future:
- consider switching away from Arch Linux for my dev container, with great sadness. A rolling distro is a terrible idea in the current security climate. I loved using Arch for my dev container exactly because of AUR.
- switch to Fedora Stable, perhaps the previous release which still gets security fixes but no other updates. I am still on Fedora 43, I guess I have no rush to update to 44.
- be even lazier in updating my workstation. I used to update daily when I was running Arch, then I moved to weekly last year when I got stuck with slow internet, now consider updating monthly or more (of course, unless there are critical security bugs)
- Flatpak and Flathub terrify me, it's only a matter of time until malware appears. I have had automatic upgrades disabled for a while.
- for the love of God don't touch anything that uses npm
If your manifest is covertly injecting malware into the build it could be easily missed. Consider some of the manifests are simply downloading deb packages and unzipping them.
Wow, this is effectively the end of the AUR model. There's been a malicious package or two before, but an attack this widespread shows things are fundamentally broken. Guess I'll be switching to a new OS this weekend across multiple machines.
> Guess I'll be switching to a new OS this weekend across multiple machines.
This is a bit of an odd response. Arch very explicitly separates the AUR from everything else and doesn't make it easy to work with, because its security model has always been fundamentally broken and requires you to do your own vetting. It exists to facilitate sharing of package recipes between untrusted users. You should treat it like a pastebin.
Nothing here is "fundamentally broken". Any usage of AUR was always one step above executing random shell scripts from the net, and any official Archlinux guides were explicit about it. That's why there are no AUR helper tools in official repos and their usage was always discouraged in forums/wiki.
PKGBUILDs are easily readable/reviewable and rarely go beyond a single page. Just take a moment and be responsible and review before running executable files you download from the net. Common sense stuff. That's always been the trade-off and it hasn't really changed much in last 20 years (even though every few years everyone seems to freak out over it).
AUR doesn't guarantee security, its upto the user to use AUR & verify before installing anything, its very evident why arch is not used in enterprise solutions.
Obviously installing anything from AUR must be done cautiously and there have always been sketchy (as in improperly built/packaged) packages in the past but seeing actively malicious injections is concerning. I think there are two main problems with AUR: 1. it is a remnant of a slightly more egalitarian era in the open source history when you could generally trust 3rd party code and 2. orphaned packages can be adopted by anyone with their full history and vetting intact.
I think we are well past (1) but (2) could be mitigated by tighter controls on AUR accounts and potentially additional safeguards from AUR helpers. Maybe show a big scary warning if the package has changed owners recently. I know there will still be people that will "y" their way forward but it's better than nothing.
Or just avoid AUR helpers altogether and inspect/build the packages you need yourself from their PKGBUILDs directly.
There was never an era in which #2 was a reasonable policy.
The canonical answer to any concerns with the AUR is always “just read the PKGBUILDs bro”
This campaign is still ongoing. I just got an email that one of my old packages (which hasn't worked for years and was orphaned for a while) was adopted and immediately a malicious commit was pushed. They seem to be using bun instead of npm now, so any npm-based workaround likely isn't effective.
https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/commit/?h=toggldeskto...
I remember installing an emulator (Mednafen) on Arch Linux about a decade ago. The program failed to run because it was linked against a library my system didn't have. Turns out, the maintainer built the software on his own system and it used a library he had on his system but was not listed in the dependencies.
It is an officially maintained package and I always assumed these were built on a dedicated build server instead of some a random volunteer/home computer. Don't know if Arch still builds the same way but this event scared me enough to switch distros.
Here's an easy script to scan for compromised packages:
https://cscs.pastes.sh/aurvulntest20260611.sh
Not my script. It's easy to read/parse. Never pipe a script directly to bash.
Note that pacman supports date locales; searching for '9 Jun' only works in English locales (or locales using similar formatting, I suppose).
After correcting, for me, it flagged "jd-gui", but I had actually installed "jd-gui-bin" about two hours before the compromise. As far as I can tell, I was lucky that I felt lazy that night and went for the -bin package instead of waiting for the source to be compiled.
A quicker alternative:
It's never a bad time to learn about comm(1).It isn't guaranteed that the list is conclusive.
Always check PKGBUILD and sources, AUR is not to be trusted for the most part. I'm actually more surprised that such compromise hasn't happened earlier.
> hasn't happened earlier.
it happens all the time
Just not always on this scale and doesn't always end up on HN.
Similar to how you don't see every npm supply chain attack or malicious github action or similar on HN.
In general you _have to_ manually review every PKGBUILD update by hand (by diff). Everything else is neglect IMHO. Luckily for most packages this is reasonably doable, IFF you trust the upstream sources they fetch from. (As in: Most packages are a small amount of glue between pacman and a upstream source.)
As consequence AUR packages with AUR dependencies are in general "uh..., lets not do it" cases for me, as on one hand the review overhead can be a pain and on the other hand it's easy to make a mistake overlooking a change in AUR dependencies.
Still the policy which allows relatively easy adoption of orphaned packages is IMHO a problem. A adoption should be treated as a new package which just happen to have the same name. (It can be fine to not have that if arch maintainers "bless" the adoption, but IMHO that would only matter for a view very widely used packages which are candidates to be included in the official repo but aren't for e.g. license reasons.)
> I'm actually more surprised that such compromise hasn't happened earlier.
This is like the 3rd or 4th time. It's been ongoing and persistent for the last 2 years with frequent AUR downtime as a result.
The AUR should be deprecated in its current state, simply can't be trusted and is a blemish on an otherwise great distro.
The Arch Wiki does note that malware has made it into the AUR several times before.
Here's a commit showing how they did it: https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/commit/?h=pass-cli&id...
Internet archive URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20260611213640/https://aur.archl...
I haven't used Arch for a few years now, but when I did the AUR was my favourite aspect.
It was never perfect from a security PoV, but in 2026 this kind of trust model feels increasingly scary.
We are pretty far from "never perfect"
Thanks for the link. It contains link to list of the affected packages, that will be useful.
third time this has happened:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17501379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44607740
More news is coming out about this:
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arch-Linux-AUR-400-Compromised
I toyed with the idea that someone should write a binary that simply emails, or alert you when it's been run... as a canary... and call that `npm`.
At this point, not renaming the npm binary is a big risk.
This is especially gnarly as more people have been picking up arch distros as of late (like CachyOS).
Installed CachyOS to replace my Win 10 installation a month ago. Not looking back! But yeah this sucks, I've mostly used Ubuntu with apt in the past. Pacman and makepkg felt a bit weird to use in the beginning.
On the bright side you can get quite far without the AUR.
I have 1,135 packages installed. Only 3 top level packages are from the AUR and 2 of those 3 are from the same author, they just happened to split their packages into a client / server architecture.
Man, I never hear good security things about npm
This doesn't really have anything to do with npm.
From the Arch mailing list [0]
>The result is a rather long list of ~408 packages all doing npm install atomic-lockfile something something
[0] https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/aur-general@lists....
They could've pip installed, curl|sh'd or anything else, it's not relevant to the underlying issue.
Perhaps there were other vectors, but npm was the one used here.
And yes, this is an AUR issue, but npm being used to host and dissiminate malware is also [a chronic] one, even if separate.
anything except that it's malware installed via npm
So true. The JavaScript ecosystem is trash.
Be aware of false positives! I found I had two of these packages installed, clang19 and compiler-rt19, but due to my recent laziness in updating my system, mine were still the versions from July 2025 from the official repos before they had relegated them to AUR.
You can check the build and install date with `pacman -Qi <package>`.
I run Arch Linux in a container (within Fedora Silverblue), but my plan for the future:
- consider switching away from Arch Linux for my dev container, with great sadness. A rolling distro is a terrible idea in the current security climate. I loved using Arch for my dev container exactly because of AUR.
- switch to Fedora Stable, perhaps the previous release which still gets security fixes but no other updates. I am still on Fedora 43, I guess I have no rush to update to 44. - be even lazier in updating my workstation. I used to update daily when I was running Arch, then I moved to weekly last year when I got stuck with slow internet, now consider updating monthly or more (of course, unless there are critical security bugs)
- Flatpak and Flathub terrify me, it's only a matter of time until malware appears. I have had automatic upgrades disabled for a while.
- for the love of God don't touch anything that uses npm
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48458931
I also had an affected package installed, fortunately it was from the official repo before it was dropped and became an AUR package.
> Flatpak and Flathub terrify me
I thought Flathub has a review and approval process. Does it fall short in some fundamental way?
Any review process is more than the AUR and NPM are doing.
Flathub only reviews the manifest.
If your manifest is covertly injecting malware into the build it could be easily missed. Consider some of the manifests are simply downloading deb packages and unzipping them.
How a person 'adopts' 408 packages and controls their build scripts?
Orphaned packages, so other people are able to file requests and take over them. That's how AUR works — it's community-driven [0].
[0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_User_Repository
They were orphaned, so anyone could adopt them. There are 15k other orphans at the moment.
Wow, this is effectively the end of the AUR model. There's been a malicious package or two before, but an attack this widespread shows things are fundamentally broken. Guess I'll be switching to a new OS this weekend across multiple machines.
> Guess I'll be switching to a new OS this weekend across multiple machines.
This is a bit of an odd response. Arch very explicitly separates the AUR from everything else and doesn't make it easy to work with, because its security model has always been fundamentally broken and requires you to do your own vetting. It exists to facilitate sharing of package recipes between untrusted users. You should treat it like a pastebin.
Nothing here is "fundamentally broken". Any usage of AUR was always one step above executing random shell scripts from the net, and any official Archlinux guides were explicit about it. That's why there are no AUR helper tools in official repos and their usage was always discouraged in forums/wiki.
PKGBUILDs are easily readable/reviewable and rarely go beyond a single page. Just take a moment and be responsible and review before running executable files you download from the net. Common sense stuff. That's always been the trade-off and it hasn't really changed much in last 20 years (even though every few years everyone seems to freak out over it).
AUR doesn't guarantee security, its upto the user to use AUR & verify before installing anything, its very evident why arch is not used in enterprise solutions.
It's not the AUR. It's the rolling release cycle, and probably even more importantly, lack of support options.
The AUR has absolutely nothing to do with the rolling release cycle
yes & comment didn't mention that both are dependent, fooqux is correct.
Agree
Arch is not used in enterprise solutions because of the AUR? Can't you just not use it?
AUR is choice, rolling release is the reason