mrcjkb

> Any way of nudging either of us to check, "Hey, something important about LuaRocks, check your email" in a dm

That is exactly what Vhyrro tried to do on Matrix. The room had active messages from July/August and no notice of departure, so we had no reason to assume it wouldn't reach you.

> or a message to anyone else related to LuaRocks

That's how we got the link to the Matrix/Gitter room in the first place.

> Were you a politician in another life?

No, but I've been told my great-great-grandad was :)

I'll send you an e-mail from my address and I'll ask Vhyrro to forward the original emails to you again.

> I'll just be blunt, I find this very hard to believe.

Email was the primary contact mechanism listed in the SECURITY.md file on GitHub. On your GitHub profile, you have listed links to socials (Mastodon/Bluesky/Twitter), your e-mail address, your personal website, and a video game website.

Messaging or tagging you there about an unpatched RCE would have effectively been a public zero-day disclosure, which we strictly wanted to avoid.

> Did you instruct other people not to use it within rocks.nvim?

That, too, would have been a public disclosure. All we knew at the time was that there appeared to be a second security researcher testing your site. In such situations, when there exists no perfect way to handle things, it's better not to "drop everything and panic", and to attempt *private* outreach via *defined* channels.

> statements like that make it hard for me to give you the benefit of the doubt regarding your attempts to contact me.

Rather than going back and forth on motives, how about we focus on establishing a clearer direct line of communication for the future?

> specifically the actual exploitation on the production server

Since I did not conduct the research myself, I am not in a position to comment on the technical details of it.

I guess if they did land in your junk folder, Gmail may have purged them automatically after 30 days. After not receiving an email response, Vhyrro asked in a group chat if there was any direct line of contact with you or Hisham that wasn't email. That's when someone gave us the luarocks gitter link. Apart from that, we couldn't find any alternative way of reaching you.

I maintain Lux with Vhyrro and feel I should clarify what actually happened here... I’ve gone through our archived Matrix chat history to clear up the timeline.

On August 7th, Vhyrro messaged me after noticing someone had uploaded malicious rockspecs, `bcrcewon-1.0.rockspec` and `7e0b94029db0`, to luarocks.org. I suggested we notify you and Hisham and gave him Hisham's e-mail address (which I had in my address book, since I had been in touch with him before and based on prior experience knew you were hard to reach). Vhyrro found your Gmail address and sent you an email on August 7th:

--- > I've noticed that somebody on luarocks.org has uploaded two potentially malicious rockspecs: [...] These two packages contain luajit bytecode instead of traditional Lua code, which means they could contain some sort of sandbox escape and could have done some damage on the actual server itself, and may be worth investigating. Coincidentally, I've been researching this exploit vector myself over the past week, but in isolation and on my local docker run of luarocks-site. It's entirely plausible that luajit bytecode has some out-of-bounds read or write which could spell trouble for the real site, which is why I am writing you with such concern. I haven't dissected the bytecode yet, and so I can't test if it works, but it might be worth preemptively rolling out a fix. Maybe a check that disallows bytecode uploads? Seeing someone attempt a similar thing on the main luarocks site is not good news, so I recommend having a look on the main server to see if anything got compromised. ---

On August 14th, Vhyrro told me he had achieved full RCE (reproduced locally on his docker instance). He spent the next day cleaning up his POC to make it consistently reproducible. On August 15th, he sent you a second follow-up email to your Gmail address. We agreed to wait for a response for 2 weeks and then look for alternate channels to reach you on. On August 16th, he told me he was considering messaging Hisham because his previous email to you about the guy pentesting your site had gone unanswered. A day later, Vhyrro again asked me if we should try reaching out to you on other channels. I urged him to give it some time because we know you & Hisham maintain LuaRocks in your free time, and we don't want to contribute to FOSS maintainer burnout.

On August 20th, we joined the official luarocks matrix room (#luarocks_luarocks:gitter.im) and found your personal Matrix handle. That's when Vhyrro DM'd you on Matrix.

Finally, on September 10th, over a month after his initial warning about the live attack and weeks after his follow-ups regarding the RCE PoC, having received no response across email or Matrix, Vhyrro submitted the report to CERT/CC.

Regarding your comment on Lux: Dismissing our work as LLM "vibe coding" (it's not) and claiming we acted out of self-interest is an unfair personal attack. We did all we could to try and warn you early while giving you enough time to address a severe issue without causing unnecessary panic.

> Lua was conceived as a configuration language

That alone is a pretty weak argument.

> Trying to abstract this away behind a CLI seems like it misses the ethos of Lua.

With `lx add <package>`, you can install the package and add it to und config file in one step. And do things like fail if the package or version doesn't exist or isn't compatible with your system.

You can provide editor plugins or use LSP to give users hints if there's an update available, and use code actions to update them, etc.

> It’s also a tad strange that a package manager designed for Lua isn’t written in Lua.

Again, the fact that Lux relates to Lua is a pretty weak argument for choosing Lua as a language to write or configure it in.

Lots of Lua libraries and packages aren't written in Lua, but are built with Lua bindings. Lua (which as you yourself just mentioned was conceived as a configuration language) is a pretty poor choice for something with the scope of Lux. In fact, luarocks was recently rewritten in Teal. Lux has a Lua API (lux-lua) which means it can be embedded or used as a Lua library.

> Presumably Lua developers already have Lua installed, know Lua, and would more likely contribute to a project written in Lua.

We're not worried about finding contributors. If anything, what we need are high quality contributions. Lua developers who only know Lua are not what we're looking for.

Right, my bad. Still, being able to do more to aid the creation and maintenance of packages than just install packages doesn't make something "not a package manager".

It's just a silly pun. Search for "moon illuminance" and perhaps you'll get it :)

Lux helps you install and create/maintain packages. Linting is a useful step in the creation of packages.

Pip lets you create virtual environments. Does that mean it's an environment manager, not a package manager?

(╭ರ_•́)

That's a neat idea, but it would mean we'd have to maintain our own library. When editing with the CLI, you have to make sure you preserve comments, which the toml-edit crate does quite well.

Good thing we're not giving options for no reason other than to give options ;)

> presumably because that's what Cargo does.

Nope. We chose TOML as the default for various reasons:

- Simplicity. There are use cases for a turing complete configuration language. Lux is not one of them.

- Ergonomics. The ability to edit it using the CLI (technically, that could be possible with Lua too, but it would be a lot more complex and not a very pleasant UX).

> which, I don't know if that's the right call?

The reason we currently support importing a Lua extra.rockspec is ease of migration for complex projects, e.g. with platform-specific overrides (not yet supported by the TOML spec).