ncurses-life

MEDIUM

maintainer keenerd 6 votes scanned 2026-09-17 00:27:14.276658

View on AUR

Why flagged

The PKGBUILD downloads an HTML page from a personal/unofficial host (csiuo.com) with SKIP'd checksum, then extracts and reconstructs a Perl script from the HTML content via sed, and installs it as an executable. This is a genuine supply-chain concern: there is no integrity verification (SKIP md5sum), the source is a personal website rather than an official upstream release, and the extracted code is executed as a script. If the page were tampered with or the site compromised, arbitrary Perl code could be injected and installed. The maintainer even comments '# scary...' acknowledging the unusual approach. The pattern of parsing executable code out of HTML with no checksum is a real medium-severity supply-chain risk, not a false positive.

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:7 url="http://csiuo.com/drupal/content/ncurses-life"

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 an HTML page from a personal/unofficial host (csiuo.com) with SKIP'd checksum, then extracts and reconstructs a Perl script from the HTML content via sed, and installs it as an executable. This is a genuine supply-chain concern: there is no integrity verification (SKIP md5sum), the source is a personal website rather than an official upstream release, and the extracted code is executed as a script. If the page were tampered with or the site compromised, arbitrary Perl code could be injected and installed. The maintainer even comments '# scary...' acknowledging the unusual approach. The pattern of parsing executable code out of HTML with no checksum is a real medium-severity supply-chain risk, not a false positive.

PKGBUILD

1 offending line(s) highlighted

      1# Maintainer: Kyle Keen <keenerd@gmail.com>
    
      2pkgname=ncurses-life
    
      3pkgver=20091024
    
      4pkgrel=2
    
      5pkgdesc="Random Conway's game of life in your terminal."
    
      6arch=('any')
    
      7url="http://csiuo.com/drupal/content/ncurses-life"
    
      8license=('custom:copyright')
    
      9depends=('perl-curses')
    
      10source=(http://csiuo.com/drupal/content/ncurses-life)
    
      11md5sums=('SKIP')
    
      12
    
      13build() {
    
      14  cd "$srcdir"
    
      15  # scary...
    
      16  ncl=$(sed -n '/#!\/usr\/bin\/perl/,/endwin/p' ncurses-life)
    
      17  ncl=$(sed 's/<[^>]*>//g' <<< "$ncl")
    
      18  ncl=$(sed 's/&nbsp;/ /g' <<< "$ncl")
    
      19  ncl=$(sed   's/&gt;/>/g' <<< "$ncl")
    
      20  ncl=$(sed   's/&lt;/</g' <<< "$ncl")
    
      21  ncl=$(sed  's/&#40;/(/g' <<< "$ncl")
    
      22  ncl=$(sed  's/&#41;/)/g' <<< "$ncl")
    
      23  ncl=$(sed 's/&#123;/{/g' <<< "$ncl")
    
      24  ncl=$(sed 's/&#125;/}/g' <<< "$ncl")
    
      25  ncl=$(sed  's/&#91;/[/g' <<< "$ncl")
    
      26  ncl=$(sed  's/&#93;/]/g' <<< "$ncl")
    
      27  echo "$ncl" > nclife
    
      28}
    
      29
    
      30package() {
    
      31  cd "$srcdir"
    
      32  install -Dm755 nclife "$pkgdir/usr/bin/ncurses-life"
    
      33}
    
      34
    
      35
    
      36

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