this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
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This is a great start, but tbh, I’m not fully sold on “verified” flathub apps. Verification requires a token to be placed into a source repo or a website, but there appears to be nothing on actually verifying that the source/site are the original creators. So, for example, if someone packaged a malicious version of librefox and established it under io.github.librewolf-community instead of the canonical io.gitlab.librewolf-community, I’m concerned it’ll still show as verified (though quickly removed). The process can be read about here.
Is the token not keyed to a specific source? I would have expected it to operate similarly to an SSL cert, where part of the verification process is that the source is the correct origin that the token belongs to - so if someone just lifted a valid cert to put into a malicious one, it would catch anything from changing a single character in the project name to changing the repository host (i.e. GitHub to GitLab)
Afaik yes, the token is keyed to a specific source in the case of verifying through a website, but from what I can tell, that doesn’t stop someone else from creating a separate malicious website (or git repo) that looks similar but contains malware, and publishing that as a verified app with a similar name as the real app to flathub (so there would be multiple versions of an app, with only 1 being the “real” one on flathub).