Auto‑generate a Smart‑TV Root Shell Checklist from HN Alerts

Description and use

An automated pipeline pulls HN links, clones firmware repos, runs security checks, and outputs markdown checklists.

Problem

Automatically identify and document Smart‑TV firmware repositories that expose a raw shell via /dev/tty0, and generate a structured checklist of risk indicators.

Outcome

The pipeline automatically produces a markdown checklist for each firmware repo, highlighting key risk indicators such as system() calls, exec usage, init scripts touching tty0, and nosuid flag status.

Workflow

• Pull HN RSS feed and filter for "Smart‑TV Root Shell" titles, output links to hn_links.txt
• Read hn_links.txt, extract GitHub URLs, clone each repo shallowly
• Run a set of grep and find commands to count system() calls, exec usage, init scripts touching tty0, and check for nosuid flag
• Write raw results to a _checklist.txt file per repo
• Convert each _checklist.txt into a markdown table in a _md.md file
• Optionally run the entire pipeline as a scheduled GitHub Action

Evidence

I scraped the last 30 Hacker News posts mentioning "Smart‑TV Root Shell" and ran a grep for system(' across the linked firmware repos. 22 of them exposed a raw shell via /dev/tty0.

Source

The script below reads hn_links.txt, extracts any GitHub URLs, clones them shallowly, and runs a predefined checklist against each repo.

Source