mestrenova

MEDIUM

maintainer zdmx 2 votes scanned 2026-09-17 00:27:14.276658

View on AUR

Why flagged

The PKGBUILD downloads a prebuilt binary .deb from mestrelab.com (the official vendor domain), which is a legitimate commercial NMR software vendor. The source host is the actual upstream vendor website, not a personal or unofficial host, so this is better than a random third-party host. However, the package installs a prebuilt commercial binary blob directly into /opt without any signature verification beyond a sha256sum, and the build process extracts data.tar.gz from the .deb and copies the entire /opt tree. The sha256sum provides integrity but not authenticity (no GPG signature check). The main concern is that this is a closed-source commercial binary being installed system-wide, and if the vendor's download URL were compromised or the checksum were wrong, arbitrary code would execute. This is a standard medium-risk pattern for prebuilt binary packages from official vendor sites — not clearly malicious, but a real supply-chain concern due to the executed binary nature and lack of signature verification.

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:14 source=("https://mestrelab.com/downloads/mnova/linux/Ubuntu/22.04/mestrenova_15.0.1-35756_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 mestrelab.com (the official vendor domain), which is a legitimate commercial NMR software vendor. The source host is the actual upstream vendor website, not a personal or unofficial host, so this is better than a random third-party host. However, the package installs a prebuilt commercial binary blob directly into /opt without any signature verification beyond a sha256sum, and the build process extracts data.tar.gz from the .deb and copies the entire /opt tree. The sha256sum provides integrity but not authenticity (no GPG signature check). The main concern is that this is a closed-source commercial binary being installed system-wide, and if the vendor's download URL were compromised or the checksum were wrong, arbitrary code would execute. This is a standard medium-risk pattern for prebuilt binary packages from official vendor sites — not clearly malicious, but a real supply-chain concern due to the executed binary nature and lack of signature verification.

PKGBUILD

1 offending line(s) highlighted

      1# Maintainer: zandemax <zandemax@zmnet.de>
    
      2# Contributor: 3yan <zelenkaj@vscht.cz>
    
      3# Contributor: Pinky <j-pi@seznam.cz>
    
      4
    
      5pkgname=mestrenova
    
      6pkgver=15.0.1
    
      7pkgrel=1
    
      8pkgdesc="Widely used commercial NMR interpreter"
    
      9arch=('x86_64')
    
      10url="https://www.mestrelab.com"
    
      11install=mestrenova.install
    
      12license=('custom:mestrelab')
    
      13depends=('libxi' 'glu' 'openssl-1.0')
    
      14source=("https://mestrelab.com/downloads/mnova/linux/Ubuntu/22.04/mestrenova_15.0.1-35756_amd64.deb")
    
      15sha256sums=('1a1de52a4d34e0da5cbe1892c0d856eb6d0802a872c43649d7edce7e6e21ebc8')
    
      16
    
      17options=(!strip) 
    
      18
    
      19package() {
    
      20    tar -xf data.tar.gz
    
      21    cp -R opt ${pkgdir}/opt
    
      22
    
      23    install -D -m0644 ${pkgdir}/opt/MestReNova/share/license/license.txt "${pkgdir}/usr/share/licenses/mestrenova/LICENSE"
    
      24}
    
      25
    
      26

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