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IIRC, in the past Curl had some bad defaults.

But, it is known that there are state-level actors which can forge certificates (because they can coerce CAs). This has happened. You may take a moment to consider whether state-level actors are part of your threat model (and not everyone has an answer to that which they like).



Yes, that's "security by dramatization". ;-)

I'm not saying that curl|sh is the golden standard for software deployment.

But the choice is not really between "curl|sh pi-hole" and "pi-hole in a well-known package archive, with signature". It's "curl|sh pi-hole or no pi-hole at all".

I just feel triggered by this security absolutism where everything is shit, and unless you're doing an offline multi-way key generation with subsequent physical destruction of the equipment used, you should just shut up and not release software.


> Yes, that's "security by dramatization". ;-)

I'm not entirely sure what you mean here, are you poking fun at people who put state-level actors in their threat models? Because for some of us, the choice is between ignoring attacks from state-level actors and figuring out ways to mitigate the attacks, there is no third option where the state-level actors do not attack us.

> I just feel triggered by this security absolutism where everything is shit, and unless you're doing an offline multi-way key generation with subsequent physical destruction of the equipment used, you should just shut up and not release software.

Honestly? I feel you've described my complaints with your argument. Security is a matter of degrees, threat models, evaluating likelihoods and potential severity of attacks, weighing the cost of prevention against the cost and likelihood of a successful attack.

The fact is that curl|sh has a lot of problems that a .deb and src .deb signed by some random developer's key doesn't have. It's not some kind of black-and-white world where curl|sh is inexcusable, it's just a world where on the sliding scale of security versus convenience, some of us think curl|sh is just a little too insecure for what little convenience it provides. I would get a headache trying to write the kind of shell script that makes a cross-distro curl|sh work at all.

> But the choice is not really between "curl|sh pi-hole" and "pi-hole in a well-known package archive, with signature". It's "curl|sh pi-hole or no pi-hole at all".

The third choice is to clone the Pi Hole repository from GitHub and build that.




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