This is misleading at best. “verified” only means that Flathub knows who did the upload. It doesn’t tell you anything about the safety of the app, and it doesn’t mean the app is affiliated with who you think it is.
Traditional GNU/Linux distributions (as well as F-Droid) are not “app stores” even though they are superficially similar. Traditional distributions are maintained and curated by the community, and serve the interests of users first and software developers second, whereas an “app store” has minimal curation and serves the needs of software developers first and users second.
I point this out because there’s an annoying meme that traditional distributions are obsoleted by the “app store” model. I don’t think that’s the case. “Verification” is essential for an app store but pointless for a distribution.
This is a good step but I still feel like it’s pretty obscure where a package is actually coming from. “by Google” or for the Steam package “by Valve” is really confusing and makes it sounds like it’s coming directly from the company. Unverified tells the user to pay attention but there is no hover over to say what it actually means.
Wait… so the author displayed in “by <author>” is the supposed author of the software, not the one that put it on the store? That’s insane! Also sounds like you’d be open to massive liability since the reputation of the software author will be damaged if somebody publishes malware under their name.
It should be:
- Developed by: <author of software>
- Uploaded by: <entity who uploaded to store>
So all of them?
Would be nice if FlatHub actually supported cryptographic verification of apps…
Flathubs repository’s is GPG signed.
Nope. Link me to the docs that say this.
The GPG key is literally in the repo file https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
Lol that’s not for signing the packages
There is no such thing as a “package”. It is a repository of binary data with references to data in it (ala git). The whole repo and all data is gpg signed.
Your claim that package payloads are signed is bullshit. Back it up by citing your sources
> ostree show flathub:runtime/org.kde.Platform/x86_64/6.6 commit a7443e846cf67d007fcecda5c9dc27844001cfb8929064395cfc25c6d71d9474 Parent: 23107550082daf3b2892a4a0db2543838578ca882340a756b988bc5c1614540c ContentChecksum: 607ba9475d32a24c51509bc7919f5a93d401f8f7198c30ad93ad74051d966c41 Date: 2024-01-30 13:55:08 +0000 build of org.kde.Sdk, Tue Jan 30 11:23:00 UTC 2024 (5998d2f3ef21414d14f066ab91fa44e5aef65b90) Name: org.kde.Platform Arch: x86_64 Branch: 6.6 Built with: Flatpak 1.14.4 Found 1 signature: Signature made Tue 30 Jan 2024 12:21:18 PM CST using RSA key ID 562702E9E3ED7EE8 Good signature from "Flathub Repo Signing Key <flathub@flathub.org>" Primary key ID 4184DD4D907A7CAE Key expires Mon 14 Jun 2027 08:19:40 AM CDT Primary key expires Mon 14 Jun 2027 08:18:56 AM CDT
Nice
Good to see one of the two big packaging hubs do something against malware
How does that Help against Malware?
It makes it obvious to people whether they are downloading Google Chrome as packaged by Google or as by someone else. That being said, Google Chrome is malware. That being said there is a lot more that needs to be done to truly prevent malware, which will be costly but will hopefully take effect when they’ve got the budget for it
Because if you search Firefox and see a badge that says verified, you can be confident that it was Mozilla that packaged it and added it to FlatHub as opposed to some random scammer.
You can’t just upload a App to Flathub. Everythng is reviewed.
Apt has done this forever
cough cough snap cough
Snap already marks unverified apps
Verification doesnt help at all if the source is not trusted. All this says is “upstream developers maintain this package”. Unofficial packages can be safe too, like VLC.
It does help prevent actual malware from being downloaded, though, since upstream developers probably won’t publish malware on Flathub.
But this is still a half-measure. I don’t understand why Red Hat and Canonical don’t treat this issue seriously; people on Linux are used to assuming software installed from the repos are safe, and yet Snap and Flatpak are being pushed more and more despite their main repositories being potentially unsafe.
Because both Red Hat and Canonical are of the “pay us to care” mindset. If you aren’t paying for support, you’re a freeloader and need to do your own research.
Fedora has their own flatpak repo built from their own rpms and their own runtime. Flathub has more flatpaks though.
