221
What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world
(arstechnica.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
221 points (100.0% liked)
Programming
17303 readers
38 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Everybody keeps saying it was found by luck, but this seems like it was found by a guy who maintains his repository properly and monitors his CPU cycles diligently just to prevent this sort of thing. I guess I would call it lucky he found it so quickly, but it was definitely not found by luck.
The fact that that person happened to be looking on a system downstream to this one, while also having the context needed to pin it back to xz in particular is the lucky part. The same attack in any of countless other places wouldn't have gotten spotted the same way, or as quickly. That's not to say diligence on Freund's part wasn't a big factor here, but it's important to identify that luck was a big factor.
It's more so lucky that there was someone diligently doing that. It could've easily gone unnoticed had there not been someone like him.
Yep. It could also be found by luck a bit later, or caught in a strict process sooner or later that we won't know.
No process is perfect, but the fact this attack is super complex, with many levels of indirection on run time, detecting if it's in debug mode, forcing maintainers to disable Oss fuzzer (a tool that scans source code for bugs and vulnerabilities) and also involved social engineering and took years to get close to widespread release is to show what it takes to plant a back door on 100% Foss systems.
As opposed to closed source, where all it takes is a conversation between govt and a CEO.