hub-kids

maintainer max.bra · 2 votes · scanned 2026-08-03 00:08:14.047287

MEDIUM

Why flagged The PKGBUILD downloads a zip from bce.mondadorieducation.it (Mondadori Education, the Italian educational publisher behind HUB Kids/HUB Scuola), extracts a Debian package from it, and installs a prebuilt binary (hub-kids-prod) directly onto the system. The host appears to be the legitimate vendor CDN for Mondadori Education's digital learning platform, not a random personal host, which reduces but does not eliminate the risk. The core concern remains: a prebuilt, closed-source binary is pulled from a vendor CDN with no reproducibility, no upstream signature verification beyond a single sha256sum, and installed as an executable. If the CDN were compromised or the URL silently redirected, arbitrary code would execute. This is a textbook supply-chain medium: not clearly malicious, but an executed binary from a non-distro, non-auditable source. The sha256sum provides some integrity guarantee against in-transit tampering but not against the vendor host itself being compromised or the binary being replaced at source.

Triggered rules

MEDIUM source=() URL on a non-standard host source_untrusted_domain

One or more source=() URLs point to a host outside the trusted allowlist (github.com, gitlab.com, codeberg.org, pypi.org, …).

PKGBUILD:24 source=(https://bce.mondadorieducation.it/media_educar/contenuti/appdilettura/kidslinux.zip)

MEDIUM AI review llm_review

An AI model (anthropic/claude-4.6-sonnet-20260217) reviewed this and agrees it is MEDIUM (confidence 72%): The PKGBUILD downloads a zip from bce.mondadorieducation.it (Mondadori Education, the Italian educational publisher behind HUB Kids/HUB Scuola), extracts a Debian package from it, and installs a prebuilt binary (hub-kids-prod) directly onto the system. The host appears to be the legitimate vendor CDN for Mondadori Education's digital learning platform, not a random personal host, which reduces but does not eliminate the risk. The core concern remains: a prebuilt, closed-source binary is pulled from a vendor CDN with no reproducibility, no upstream signature verification beyond a single sha256sum, and installed as an executable. If the CDN were compromised or the URL silently redirected, arbitrary code would execute. This is a textbook supply-chain medium: not clearly malicious, but an executed binary from a non-distro, non-auditable source. The sha256sum provides some integrity guarantee against in-transit tampering but not against the vendor host itself being compromised or the binary being replaced at source.

PKGBUILD

1 offending line(s) highlighted

      1# Maintainer: max.bra <max dot bra at alice dot it>
    
      2
    
      3pkgname=hub-kids
    
      4pkgver=7.2.385
    
      5pkgrel=1
    
      6pkgdesc="La piattaforma facile, gratuita e innovativa per la didattica digitale."
    
      7arch=('x86_64')
    
      8url="https://www.hubscuola.it/download-app"
    
      9license=('unknown')
    
      10depends=('sdl2' 'unzip')
    
      11optdepends=(
    
      12'chromium: a modern browser for the application to work'
    
      13'firefox: a modern browser for the application to work'
    
      14'google-chrome: a modern browser for the application to work'
    
      15'evince: a pdf viewer'
    
      16'epdfview: a pdf viewer'
    
      17'qpdfview: a pdf viewer'
    
      18'mupdf: a pdf viewer'
    
      19)
    
      20options=(!strip)
    
      21
    
      22_debname=HUB-Kids.deb
    
      23
    
      24source=(https://bce.mondadorieducation.it/media_educar/contenuti/appdilettura/kidslinux.zip)
    
      25sha256sums=('6576a5f73856880a97ad0d5de55492cba2f225fd138240da32b7cb73463f41ea')
    
      26
    
      27prepare() {
    
      28  cd "$srcdir"
    
      29  msg2 "Decompressing Debian package..."
    
      30  ar xv "${_debname}" > /dev/null
    
      31  tar -xf data.tar.zst > /dev/null
    
      32
    
      33  #find ./{etc,usr} -type d -exec chmod 755 '{}' \;
    
      34  find ./usr -type d -exec chmod 755 '{}' \;
    
      35  chmod 755 ./usr/local/bin/hubkids/hub-kids-prod
    
      36}
    
      37
    
      38package() {
    
      39  cd "$srcdir"
    
      40  #cp -dpr --no-preserve=ownership {opt,usr} "$pkgdir"
    
      41  cp -dpr --no-preserve=ownership ./usr "$pkgdir"
    
      42}
    
      43

Scan history

Scanned at (UTC)	Severity	Rules
2026-08-03 00:08:14	MEDIUM	2
2026-08-02 00:16:08	MEDIUM	2
2026-08-01 00:11:18	MEDIUM	2
2026-07-31 00:14:10	MEDIUM	2
2026-07-30 00:17:23	MEDIUM	2
2026-07-29 00:25:53	MEDIUM	2
2026-07-28 00:07:28	MEDIUM	2
2026-07-27 00:24:32	MEDIUM	2
2026-07-26 00:07:32	MEDIUM	2
2026-07-25 00:13:44	MEDIUM	2
2026-07-24 00:02:28	MEDIUM	2
2026-07-23 00:14:47	MEDIUM	2
2026-07-22 00:29:32	MEDIUM	2
2026-07-21 00:24:15	MEDIUM	2
2026-07-20 00:19:49	MEDIUM	2
2026-07-19 00:17:08	MEDIUM	2
2026-07-18 00:14:48	MEDIUM	2
2026-07-17 00:06:16	MEDIUM	2
2026-07-16 00:05:41	MEDIUM	2
2026-07-15 00:09:25	MEDIUM	2