Programming

17677 readers

55 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

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 2 years ago

MODERATORS

snowe@programming.dev

Ategon@programming.dev

MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz

222

What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world (arstechnica.com)

submitted 9 months ago by canpolat@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev

35 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 54 points 9 months ago (8 children)

Specifically, SSH logins were consuming too many CPU cycles and were generating errors with valgrind, a utility for monitoring computer memory.

Through sheer luck and Freund’s careful eye, he eventually discovered the problems were the result of updates that had been made to xz Utils. On Friday, Freund took to the Open Source Security List to disclose the updates were the result of someone intentionally planting a backdoor in the compression software.

It is lucky that Andres Freund checked and found the issue in valgrind that was maybe intentionally or maybe unintentionally.

https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/03/29/4

I'm interested in figuring out what happened and more information on the contributor behind the attack.

[–] derptastic@lemmy.nz 11 points 8 months ago (2 children)

to me: the most chilling thing is that someone involved in the open source ecosystem introduced this vulnerability and, if it was intentional, what else did they do?

[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 13 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That's what I'm most curious about. Was it government? Was it Microsoft, Apple or Google? Was it some lone hacker or group looking for money? Was it just an OSS developer that wanted revenge? It would make for a spicy story.

[–] jonne@infosec.pub 19 points 8 months ago

It looks like a state actor, but hard to tell who. The way they did it was by bullying the original overworked maintainer into making someone else a co-maintainer, and that new co-maintainer introduced the backdoor. The accounts that pressured him into adding another maintainer all appear to have been sock puppets.

It just shows how little support there is for the lone maintainers of basic utilities that we all use, and it's really something we need to do something about.

[–] Flipper@feddit.de 9 points 8 months ago

It isn't if it was intentional. It was intentional. Otherwise the exploit chain wouldn't be so convoluted.

load more comments (5 replies)