scholaread-bin

MEDIUM

maintainer summerelement 0 votes scanned 2026-09-17 00:27:14.276658

View on AUR

Why flagged

This PKGBUILD downloads a prebuilt binary .deb from cdn.scholaread.com (the vendor's own CDN, not a personal/unofficial host) and installs it directly. The main concerns are: (1) sha256sums=('SKIP') means no integrity verification — any compromise of the CDN or a MITM attack would silently deliver malicious binaries; (2) the package installs a setuid-root binary (chrome-sandbox with chmod 4755), which is a high-privilege operation; (3) it's a closed-source Electron app binary with no source verification. However, cdn.scholaread.com appears to be the official vendor CDN for the scholaread.com product, making this more of a standard 'binary from vendor' AUR pattern rather than a clearly unofficial/personal host. The SKIP checksum is the real concern — it means every install fetches whatever is currently at that URL with no pinning. This is a genuine supply-chain risk (medium) but not evidence of active malice.

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:16 source=("${pkgname}-${pkgver}.deb::https://cdn.scholaread.com/assets/pc-releases/${pkgver}/com/Scholaread-linux-amd64-${pkgver}.deb")

Medium AI review llm_review

An AI model (anthropic/claude-4.6-sonnet-20260217) reviewed this and agrees it is MEDIUM (confidence 80%): This PKGBUILD downloads a prebuilt binary .deb from cdn.scholaread.com (the vendor's own CDN, not a personal/unofficial host) and installs it directly. The main concerns are: (1) sha256sums=('SKIP') means no integrity verification — any compromise of the CDN or a MITM attack would silently deliver malicious binaries; (2) the package installs a setuid-root binary (chrome-sandbox with chmod 4755), which is a high-privilege operation; (3) it's a closed-source Electron app binary with no source verification. However, cdn.scholaread.com appears to be the official vendor CDN for the scholaread.com product, making this more of a standard 'binary from vendor' AUR pattern rather than a clearly unofficial/personal host. The SKIP checksum is the real concern — it means every install fetches whatever is currently at that URL with no pinning. This is a genuine supply-chain risk (medium) but not evidence of active malice.

PKGBUILD

1 offending line(s) highlighted

      1# Maintainer: SummerElement <Dapugongying@foxmail.com>
    
      2pkgname=scholaread-bin
    
      3pkgver=1.1.66
    
      4pkgrel=3
    
      5pkgdesc="A helpful AI driven software that helps you do research."
    
      6arch=('x86_64')
    
      7url="https://scholaread.com"
    
      8license=('custom')
    
      9depends=('gtk3' 'nss' 'libxss' 'libxtst')
    
      10optdepends=('libnotify: desktop notifications support'
    
      11            'xdg-utils: open URLs in browser'
    
      12            'libsecret: password storage support'
    
      13            'at-spi2-core: accessibility support'
    
      14            'util-linux-libs: UUID generation support'
    
      15            'libappindicator: system tray icon support')
    
      16source=("${pkgname}-${pkgver}.deb::https://cdn.scholaread.com/assets/pc-releases/${pkgver}/com/Scholaread-linux-amd64-${pkgver}.deb")
    
      17sha256sums=('SKIP')
    
      18
    
      19package() {
    
      20    # unzip DEB
    
      21    ar x "${srcdir}/${pkgname}-${pkgver}.deb"
    
      22    tar -xf data.tar.xz -C "${pkgdir}"
    
      23
    
      24    # fix file permission
    
      25    chmod +x "${pkgdir}/opt/Scholaread/scholaread"
    
      26    chmod 4755 "${pkgdir}/opt/Scholaread/chrome-sandbox"
    
      27
    
      28    # setup license
    
      29    install -Dm644 "${pkgdir}/opt/Scholaread/LICENSE.electron.txt" \
    
      30        "${pkgdir}/usr/share/licenses/${pkgname}/LICENSE"
    
      31}
    
      32
    
      33post_install() {
    
      34    # update icon cache
    
      35    update-desktop-database
    
      36    gtk-update-icon-cache -qt /usr/share/icons/hicolor
    
      37}
    
      38
    
      39post_upgrade() {
    
      40    post_install
    
      41}
    
      42
    
      43post_remove() {
    
      44    post_install
    
      45}
    
      46

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