> The Debian development team declined to remove the affected images, stating that they were development builds that should not be used on real systems in place of newer, clean container versions.
>While xz is commonly present in most Linux distributions,
Not Slackware since Slackware does not patch xz or many other utilities. Plus it does not use systemd. From what I remember a patch was put in to give systemd extra functionality and someone used that patch to sneak in the backdoor.
The xz attach happened cuz systemd's library dynamically linked against xz for compression of various tools in systemd and a downstream patch for openssh (IIRC) was used to link against libsystemd to use some founctions for the sd-notify protocol.
This wasn't exactly necessary since the protocol has been stable for external use for ages (since its inception IIRC) and is relatively trivial to implement.
Since the attack happened openssh gained native support for the sd-notify protocol, the sd-notify man page has an example implementation that is freely usable and libsystemd now only loads xz (and most of its other libraries) when explicitly requested by one of the tools via `dlopen`.
Given this was backdoor was likely funded by a nation-state actor and very carefully obfuscated, the fact that it was discovered within a month and never rolled out to production releases, shows that the open source process mostly worked. Not saying it couldn't be better.
I kinda disagree. This was luck. A dev on an unrelated project happened upon it and was diligent enough to dig in. A single change to any number of variables would have meant disaster.
I worked at a company that got red teamed. The pen testers were inside the network and were only found by a random employee who happened to be running little snitch and got a weird pop-up
Nobody celebrated the fact that the intrusion was detected. It was pure luck, too late, and the entire infosec leadership was fired as a result.
Like this xv issue, none of the usual systems meant to detect this attack seemed to work, and it was only due to the diligence of a single person unrelated to the project was it not a complete show.
Contributors and their submissions are vetted by maintainers. New maintainers are ideally vetted by existing maintainers. This can obviously break down in undermaintained projects.
LunaSea|2 months ago
Classic Debian security management
BrouteMinou|2 months ago
Do you have many more examples to call that a "classic" Debian security behaviour?
jmclnx|2 months ago
Not Slackware since Slackware does not patch xz or many other utilities. Plus it does not use systemd. From what I remember a patch was put in to give systemd extra functionality and someone used that patch to sneak in the backdoor.
NekkoDroid|2 months ago
This wasn't exactly necessary since the protocol has been stable for external use for ages (since its inception IIRC) and is relatively trivial to implement.
Since the attack happened openssh gained native support for the sd-notify protocol, the sd-notify man page has an example implementation that is freely usable and libsystemd now only loads xz (and most of its other libraries) when explicitly requested by one of the tools via `dlopen`.
flykespice|2 months ago
It's an old legacy technology that needs to die out from all forms of distributions (looking at you GNU)
pogopop77|2 months ago
mingus88|2 months ago
I worked at a company that got red teamed. The pen testers were inside the network and were only found by a random employee who happened to be running little snitch and got a weird pop-up
Nobody celebrated the fact that the intrusion was detected. It was pure luck, too late, and the entire infosec leadership was fired as a result.
Like this xv issue, none of the usual systems meant to detect this attack seemed to work, and it was only due to the diligence of a single person unrelated to the project was it not a complete show.
jqpabc123|2 months ago
Who vets contributors, maintainers and submissions?
Answer: Unknown in many (if not most) cases. Unless you have the time and expertise to do so yourself; it is purely based on trust.
nwellnhof|2 months ago
yjftsjthsd-h|2 months ago
unknown|2 months ago
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