pulse-secure

maintainer akosmolnar · 41 votes · scanned 2026-08-03 00:08:14.047287

MEDIUM

Why flagged The PKGBUILD downloads a prebuilt RPM binary installer from dl.vpn.ucsb.edu (University of California Santa Barbara's VPN distribution server), which is an institutional mirror rather than the official Ivanti/Pulse Secure vendor domain (pulsesecure.net or ivanti.com). While this is a plausible legitimate university VPN deployment scenario (universities commonly host their own VPN client builds, sometimes customized), it still represents a real supply-chain concern: the binary is executed/installed directly, the host is not the upstream vendor, and if the university server were compromised the md5sum (already a weak hash) would be the only protection. Additionally, DLAGENTS uses curl with -k (disabling TLS certificate verification), which removes transport-layer protection entirely and means a MITM could substitute the binary. The combination of: non-vendor binary host + TLS verification disabled + weak MD5 integrity check + directly installed native binaries constitutes a genuine 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:14 source_x86_64=("https://dl.vpn.ucsb.edu/clients/Linux%20VPN%20Client/ps-pulse-linux-22.8r5-b41063-installer.rpm")

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 RPM binary installer from dl.vpn.ucsb.edu (University of California Santa Barbara's VPN distribution server), which is an institutional mirror rather than the official Ivanti/Pulse Secure vendor domain (pulsesecure.net or ivanti.com). While this is a plausible legitimate university VPN deployment scenario (universities commonly host their own VPN client builds, sometimes customized), it still represents a real supply-chain concern: the binary is executed/installed directly, the host is not the upstream vendor, and if the university server were compromised the md5sum (already a weak hash) would be the only protection. Additionally, DLAGENTS uses curl with -k (disabling TLS certificate verification), which removes transport-layer protection entirely and means a MITM could substitute the binary. The combination of: non-vendor binary host + TLS verification disabled + weak MD5 integrity check + directly installed native binaries constitutes a genuine medium-severity supply-chain risk, not a false positive.

PKGBUILD

1 offending line(s) highlighted

      1# Maintainer: Chiwan Park <chiwanpark@hotmail.com>
    
      2DLAGENTS=("https::/usr/bin/curl -k -o %o %u")
    
      3
    
      4pkgname=pulse-secure
    
      5pkgver=22.8r5_b41063
    
      6pkgrel=2
    
      7pkgdesc='Ivanti Secure Access Client'
    
      8arch=(x86_64)
    
      9license=(custom)
    
      10url='https://www.pulsesecure.net/'
    
      11depends=(gcc-libs libsecret openssl curl dbus libbsd dmidecode patch)
    
      12install=${pkgname}.install
    
      13source=("EULA.txt")
    
      14source_x86_64=("https://dl.vpn.ucsb.edu/clients/Linux%20VPN%20Client/ps-pulse-linux-22.8r5-b41063-installer.rpm")
    
      15md5sums=('261848a28201e5386ec4bf587473a48b')
    
      16md5sums_x86_64=('93a073f8ff0f30d71bb603388dadb417')
    
      17optdepends=('psmisc: for pulsesvc -K', 'gtkmm3: for pulseUi', 'webkit2gtk: for pulseUi')
    
      18conflicts=(pulse-connect-secure)
    
      19options=(!strip)
    
      20
    
      21package() {
    
      22    install -Dm644 EULA.txt "$pkgdir"/usr/share/licenses/$pkgname/EULA.txt
    
      23
    
      24    for d in $(find opt/pulsesecure -type d); do
    
      25        install -dm755 "$d" "$pkgdir"/"$d";
    
      26    done
    
      27    for f in $(find opt/pulsesecure/bin -type f); do
    
      28        install -Dm755 "$f" "$pkgdir"/"$f";
    
      29    done
    
      30    for f in $(find opt/pulsesecure/lib -type f); do
    
      31        install -Dm755 "$f" "$pkgdir"/"$f";
    
      32    done
    
      33    for f in $(find opt/pulsesecure/resource -type f); do
    
      34        install -Dm644 "$f" "$pkgdir"/"$f";
    
      35    done
    
      36    install -Dm644 usr/share/man/man1/pulse.1.gz "$pkgdir"/usr/share/man/man1/pulse.1.gz
    
      37
    
      38    # we move service unit file to /usr/lib/systemd/system due to pacman limitation
    
      39    install -Dm644 lib/systemd/system/pulsesecure.service "$pkgdir"/usr/lib/systemd/system/pulsesecure.service
    
      40
    
      41    mkdir -p "$pkgdir"/usr/share/applications/ "$pkgdir"/usr/share/dbus-1/system.d/ "$pkgdir"/opt/pulsesecure/lib/JUNS/interfaces
    
      42    mkdir -p "$pkgdir"/var/lib/pulsesecure/pulse
    
      43    ln -s /opt/pulsesecure/resource/pulse.desktop "$pkgdir"/usr/share/applications/pulse.desktop
    
      44    ln -s /opt/pulsesecure/lib/JUNS/net.psecure.pulse.conf "$pkgdir"/usr/share/dbus-1/system.d/net.psecure.pulse.conf
    
      45    mkdir -p "$pkgdir"/etc/pki/ca-trust/extracted/openssl
    
      46    ln -sf /etc/ca-certificates/extracted/ca-bundle.trust.crt "$pkgdir"/etc/pki/ca-trust/extracted/openssl/ca-bundle.trust.crt
    
      47    for f in $(find opt/pulsesecure/lib/JUNS/interfaces -type l); do
    
      48        ln -s $(readlink $f) "$pkgdir"/"$f" ;
    
      49    done
    
      50}
    
      51

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