# The meaning of a package being "insecure"

**URL:** https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-meaning-of-a-package-being-insecure/9160
**Category:** Development
**Created:** [September 26, 2020, 1:08pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-meaning-of-a-package-being-insecure/9160 "2020-09-26T13:08:07Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 2

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![7c6f434c](https://discourse.nixos.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/7/8e7dd6/32.png) [@7c6f434c](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/7c6f434c)
#### Post date: [September 26, 2020, 7:51am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-meaning-of-a-package-being-insecure/9160/2 "2020-09-26T07:51:01Z")

</div>

> > [@New Merge Policy for an always-green hydra](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/new-merge-policy-for-an-always-green-hydra/8889/51):
> >
> > Just in case, I support permanently marking `ghostscript` as insecure and oppose its deletion.
> > 
> > (It is clearly unlikely to be safe for malicious files in forseeable future, and it is also quite a useful tool for processing files of known-benign origin)
> 
> I’m not sure how “insecure” applies in that case. For example there is no expectation to mark bash as insecure because it is unsafe for untrusted input 😛 But for this I mean “insecure because upstream updates are not available” not any fundamental lack of security in the package itself.

Would you consider the Bash version with (undocumented) Shellshock insecure? Ghostscript has -dSAFER mode that tries to make it a safe «only access the input and the output files» program. This seems to even be the default mode now. It has seen so many holes, that even a new re-designed implementation (which they seem to have since a recent version 9.50) would need quite a bit of time to be trusted as actually safe.

---

_[View the full topic](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-meaning-of-a-package-being-insecure/9160)._