this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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Programming
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All 9k stars, 10k PRs, 400 forks & professional web site are fake? Come on this is about the most obviously not fake project I've seen!
The same way you tell if anything can be trusted - you look at the signals and see if they are suss. In this case:
The amount of effort it would take to fake this for very little benefit is enormous.
Yeah just a little!
Technically, it is entirely possible to find a real existing project, make a carbon copy of the website (there are automated tools to accomplish this), then have a massive amount of bots give 9K stars and make a lot of PRs, issues and forks (bonus points if these are also copies of actual existing issues/PRs) and generate a fake commit history (this should be entirely possible with git), a bunch of releases could be quickly generated too. Though you would probably be able to notice pretty quickly that timestamps don't match since I don't think github features like issues can have fake timestamps (unlike git)
though I don't think this has ever actually been done, there are services that claim to sell not only stars but issues, pull requests and forks too. Though assuming the service is not just a scam in itself, any cursory look at the contents of the issues etc would probably give away that they are AI generated
Yeah possible, but this of the amount of effort that would take!
I agree it does look legitimate, I was just wondering what signs I should look out for in general. Like I'm sure fake GitHub engagement must be a thing, but I don't know how widespread it is and I don't know what the threshold is before a project can be considered definitely real. It sounds like you're saying the level of engagement on this project is well beyond what can be considered sketchy, which is helpful information. Thanks
for a large project, you can probably look at the history of issues, if there are lots of issues that are 5 years old, it's almost certainly legit
Don’t forget the 300-comment-long “+1” feature request chains
As a software developer you should have a bit of a head start - you can read the code - one of the big pluses of open source projects is it's all there in the open. Even if not familiar with the specific language used you can see the source and get a rough idea of scope and complexity.
And look at the Github details like the age, the frequency between releases, commits, forks. Malicious projects don't stick around for long on a host site like that, and they don't get 1000s of stars or lots of engagement from legitimate users. It's very difficult to fake that.
Look at the project website. Real projects have active forums, detailed wikis, and evidence of user engagement. You'll see people recommending the project elsewhere on the net if you search, or writing independent tutorials on how to deploy or use it, or reviews on YouTube etc. Look for testimonials and user experiences.
Also look at where the software is deployed and recommended. If it's included in big name Linux distros repos thats a good sign.
Look at all the things you'd be looking at for paid software to see it's actually in use and not a scam.
And try it out - it's easy to set up a VM and deploy something in a sandbox safe environment and get a feeling if it does what it claims to do. Whether that be a cut down system with docker or an entire OS in the sandbox to stress test the software and out it through its paces.
There are so many possible elements to doing "due diligence" to ensure it's legitimate but also the right solution for your needs.
There has been instances of popular and well meaning projects become hijacked by hostile actors. A recent notable example is xz, but there’s also event-stream npm package a few years ago that got infected with Bitcoin stealing code.
Just because a protect looks good now doesn’t mean it won’t turn bad in the future.
And not only would you need to audit the project. You also need to audit all of its dependencies as well. The xz vulnerability made it in to SSH. Who would think about looking into xz for vulnerabilities?
The benefit of installing back doors can be enormous.
They're asking if the entire project is somehow fake, not if it's a real project that got backdoored. That's obviously impossible to tell just based on stars, language quality, and similar heuristic signals.