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

Sat, Feb 3, 2024 1:33 PM

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 <xinyi.xu97 at gmail.com> 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
<https://github.com/wch/r-source/blob/trunk/src/modules/internet/libcurl.c>:
install.packages() calls download.packages(), and download.packages() calls
download.file(), which uses "libcurl" as its default method.

This line from R mirror
<https://github.com/wch/r-source/blob/trunk/src/modules/internet/libcurl.c#L772>
("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-key-- at 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-key-- at 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.

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

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