Please remove MacGPG from gnupg.org due to serious security concerns

Jonathan Schleifer js-gnupg-users at webkeks.org
Mon Feb 16 22:48:17 CET 2015


Hi!

I hereby request that MacGPG gets removed from gnupg.org due to serious security concerns. Basically, the first thing the Makefile in all their repos / tarballs does is this:

        @bash -c "$$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/GPGTools/GPGTools_Core/master/newBuildSystem/prepare-core.sh)"

So you type make not expecting anything bad (you verified the checksum and everything), but you just executed remote code. Great. And they even hide it from you by prefixing it with @, which is downright evil. So you never notice unless you look at the Makefile. Currently, that script clones another common repo using the unverified git:// protocol (because, why use submodules if you can do it in an insecure way?), but obviously, that can change any minute and could change just for certain IPs etc.

The developer(s) don't allow any issues on GitHub, so I tried contacting them by other means (e.g. Twitter), only to get ignored. They clearly don't care about security.

In any case, somebody who does something like this clearly doesn't care about security the least. The potential for backdoors is extremely high and I think nobody should be using any software written by this developer / these developer(s), as they clearly demonstrated that they couldn't care less about your security.

I don't feel comfortable that the majority of Mac users are using this software which doesn't care for security at all, but is used for extremely security sensitive tasks. I guess this is because gnupg.org recommends it and therefore people think it's safe. I think gnupg.org should do the contrary instead and strongly discourage using it.

--
Jonathan




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