Re: [Rd] [Feature Request] Hide API Key in download.file() / R's libcurl

[Simon Urbanek]

Any reason why you didn't use quiet=TRUE to suppress that output?

There is no official API structure for credentials in R repositories, so R has 
no way of knowing which part of the URL are credentials as it is not under R's 
purview - it could be part of the path or anything, so there is no way R can 
reliably mask it. Hence it makes more sense for the user to suppress the output 
if they think it may contain sensitive information - and R supports that.

If that's still not enough, then please make a concrete proposal that defines 
exactly what kind processing you'd like to see under what conditions - and how 
you think that will solve the problem.

Cheers,
Simon



> On Feb 2, 2024, at 5:28 AM, Xinyi  wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> When trying to install a package from R using install.packages(), it will
> print out the full url address (of the remote repository) it was trying to
> access. A bit further digging shows it is from the in_do_curlDownload
> method from R's libcurl
> :
> install.packages() calls download.packages(), and download.packages() calls
> download.file(), which uses "libcurl" as its default method.
> 
> This line from R mirror
> 
> ("if (!quiet) REprintf(_("trying URL '%s'\n"), url);")  prints the full url
> it is trying to access.
> 
> This is totally fine for public urls without credentials, but in the case
> that a given url contains an API key, it poses security issues. For
> example, if the getOption("repos") has been overridden to a
> customized repository (protected by API keys), then
>> install.packages("zoo")
> Installing packages into '--removed local directory path--'
> trying URL 'https://--removed userid--:--removed
> api-ke...@repository-addresss.com:4443/.../src/contrib/zoo_1.8-12.tar.gz  '
> Content type 'application/x-gzip' length 782344 bytes (764 KB)
> ===
> downloaded 764 KB
> 
> * installing *source* package 'zoo' ...
> -- further logs removed --
>> 
> 
> I also tried several other options:
> 
> 1. quite=1
>> install.packages("zoo", quite=1)
> It did hide the url, but it also hid all other useful information.
> 2. method="curl"
>> install.packages("zoo", method="curl")
> This does not print the url when the download is successful, but if there
> were any errors, it still prints the url with API key in it.
> 3. method="wget"
>> install.packages("zoo", method="wget")
> This hides API key by *password*, but I wasn't able to install packages
> with this method even with public repos, with the error "Warning: unable to
> access index for repository https://cloud.r-project.org/src/contrib/4.3:
> 'wget' call had nonzero exit status"
> 
> 
> In other dynamic languages' package managers like Python's pip, API keys
> are hidden by default since pip 18.x in 2018, and masked by "" from pip
> 19.x in 2019, see below examples. Can we get a similar default behaviour in
> R?
> 
> 1. with pip 10.x
> $ pip install numpy -v # API key was not hided
> Looking in indexes:  https://--removed userid--:--removed
> api-ke...@repository-addresss.com:4443/.../pypi/simple
> 2. with pip 18.x # All credentials are removed by pip
> $ pip install numpy -v
> Looking in indexes:  https://repository-addresss.com:4443/
> .../pypi/simple
> 3. with pip 19.x onwards # userid is kept, API key is replaced by 
> $ pip install numpy -v
> Looking in indexes:  https://userid:@
> repository-addresss.com:4443/.../pypi/simple
> 
> 
> I was instructed by https://www.r-project.org/bugs.html that I should get
> some discussion on r-devel before filing a feature request. So looking
> forward to comments/suggestions.
> 

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[Rd] NOTE: multiple local function definitions for ‘fun’ with different formal arguments

[Hervé Pagès]

Hi,

I just ran into this 'R CMD check' NOTE for the first time:

* checking R code for possible problems ... NOTE
toto: multiple local function definitions for ‘fun’ with different
   formal arguments

The "offending" code is something like this (simplified from the real code):

toto <- function(mode)
{
     if (mode == 1)
     fun <- function(a, b) a*b
     else
     fun <- function(u, v, w) (u + v) / w
     fun
}

Is that NOTE really intended? Hard to see why this code would be 
considered "wrong".

I know it's just a NOTE but still...

Thanks,

H.

-- 
Hervé Pagès

Bioconductor Core Team
hpages.on.git...@gmail.com

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