mega

MEDIUM

maintainer malacology 1 votes scanned 2026-09-17 00:27:14.276658

View on AUR

Why flagged

The PKGBUILD downloads a prebuilt binary .deb from megasoftware.net, which is the legitimate official site for MEGA (Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis), a well-known bioinformatics tool published by Kumar et al. The host is the genuine vendor site, not a personal or unofficial mirror. However, the package installs a closed-source prebuilt binary without source availability, which is a standard supply-chain concern for any binary-only AUR package: if the upstream host were compromised or the binary swapped, the sha256sum provides integrity checking against the recorded hash but not against a future substitution. The sha256sum is present and hardcoded, which mitigates opportunistic tampering. This pattern (official vendor binary repackaged from a .deb) is common in the AUR for proprietary software (e.g., zoom, slack, discord). The risk is real but not elevated beyond the normal binary-repackaging concern — it is not clearly malicious, and megasoftware.net is the canonical distribution point for this software. Rating medium is appropriate given the closed-source binary execution, though this is a borderline clean/medium case for a legitimate vendor binary with a checksum.

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:18 source=("https://megasoftware.net/releases/mega_$pkgver-1_amd64.deb")

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 prebuilt binary .deb from megasoftware.net, which is the legitimate official site for MEGA (Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis), a well-known bioinformatics tool published by Kumar et al. The host is the genuine vendor site, not a personal or unofficial mirror. However, the package installs a closed-source prebuilt binary without source availability, which is a standard supply-chain concern for any binary-only AUR package: if the upstream host were compromised or the binary swapped, the sha256sum provides integrity checking against the recorded hash but not against a future substitution. The sha256sum is present and hardcoded, which mitigates opportunistic tampering. This pattern (official vendor binary repackaged from a .deb) is common in the AUR for proprietary software (e.g., zoom, slack, discord). The risk is real but not elevated beyond the normal binary-repackaging concern — it is not clearly malicious, and megasoftware.net is the canonical distribution point for this software. Rating medium is appropriate given the closed-source binary execution, though this is a borderline clean/medium case for a legitimate vendor binary with a checksum.

PKGBUILD

1 offending line(s) highlighted

      1# Maintainer: Malacology <guoyizhang at malacology dot net>
    
      2# Contributor: Malacology <guoyizhang at malacology dot net>
    
      3
    
      4pkgname=mega
    
      5_pkgname=mega
    
      6pkgver=12.1.2
    
      7pkgrel=1
    
      8pkgdesc="Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msy096"
    
      9arch=('x86_64')
    
      10url="https://megasoftware.net"
    
      11license=('custom')
    
      12depends=(
    
      13	'desktop-file-utils'
    
      14	'gconf'
    
      15	'gtk2'
    
      16	'hicolor-icon-theme'
    
      17)
    
      18source=("https://megasoftware.net/releases/mega_$pkgver-1_amd64.deb")
    
      19sha256sums=('e8ad7b7e174f66ce38a88783960af4fedeaf3b4ce79d7589b3cb8fa7d6d87418')
    
      20
    
      21package() {
    
      22	tar -I zstd -xpvf  data.tar.zst -C "${pkgdir}"
    
      23	chmod 755 -R ${pkgdir}/usr
    
      24	cp -r ${pkgdir}/usr/local/* ${pkgdir}/usr/
    
      25	rm -r ${pkgdir}/usr/local
    
      26	sed -i "s/Exec=mega/Exec=mega %U/g" $pkgdir/usr/share/applications/mega.desktop
    
      27}
    
      28

Scan history

Scanned at (UTC)	Severity	Rules
2026-09-17 00:27:14	Medium	2
2026-09-16 00:03:17	Medium	2
2026-09-15 00:25:31	Medium	2
2026-09-14 00:27:57	Medium	2
2026-09-13 00:19:54	Medium	2
2026-09-12 00:25:17	Medium	2
2026-09-11 00:19:22	Medium	2
2026-09-10 00:22:44	Medium	2
2026-09-09 00:04:09	Medium	2
2026-09-08 00:18:08	Medium	2
2026-09-07 00:30:15	Medium	2
2026-09-06 00:17:06	Medium	2
2026-09-05 00:16:27	Medium	2
2026-09-04 00:03:13	Medium	2
2026-09-03 00:15:47	Medium	2
2026-09-02 00:02:31	Medium	2
2026-09-01 00:11:19	Medium	2
2026-08-31 00:19:57	Medium	2
2026-08-30 00:04:14	Medium	2
2026-08-29 00:29:17	Medium	2