Technology

59436 readers

3259 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

568

Backdoor found in widely used Linux utility breaks encrypted SSH connections (arstechnica.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

149 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The malicious changes were submitted by JiaT75, one of the two main xz Utils developers with years of contributions to the project.

“Given the activity over several weeks, the committer is either directly involved or there was some quite severe compromise of their system,” an official with distributor OpenWall wrote in an advisory. “Unfortunately the latter looks like the less likely explanation, given they communicated on various lists about the ‘fixes’” provided in recent updates. Those updates and fixes can be found here, here, here, and here.

On Thursday, someone using the developer's name took to a developer site for Ubuntu to ask that the backdoored version 5.6.1 be incorporated into production versions because it fixed bugs that caused a tool known as Valgrind to malfunction.

“This could break build scripts and test pipelines that expect specific output from Valgrind in order to pass,” the person warned, from an account that was created the same day.

One of maintainers for Fedora said Friday that the same developer approached them in recent weeks to ask that Fedora 40, a beta release, incorporate one of the backdoored utility versions.

“We even worked with him to fix the valgrind issue (which it turns out now was caused by the backdoor he had added),” the Ubuntu maintainer said.

He has been part of the xz project for two years, adding all sorts of binary test files, and with this level of sophistication, we would be suspicious of even older versions of xz until proven otherwise.

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

The issue is that it implies that open source has a problem due to volunteers that is not found in closed source, which is not really the reality.

I (partially) disagree. Fundamentally, my belief is that someone who gets paid to do the work is more rigorous doing the work than someone who does it on a volunteer basis, a human nature thing. Granted, I'm speaking very generally, and what I stated is not always true, but still.

Also, corporations that write close source programs are much more legally adverse to being sued if their product fails (there's a reason why we're seeing so many corporations slapping in arbitration clauses into their agreements these days; risk-averse).

Open source projects tend to just be more careful about their code base not being tainted, and write in disclaimers ("As-is") to protect themselves legally for the failure of the product scenario, and call it a day (again, very generally speaking (I use Fedora specifically for a reason)).

And speaking of Fedora, I do agree with your point that some open source projects are actually done by paid coders. I just believe that's more of the outlier, than the norm, though. Some of that work is done by corporate employees, but still on a volunteer basis.

Not dismissing at all, I am thankful for corporations that actually spend time letting their employees do open source work, even if it's just for their own direct benefit, as it also benefits everyone else.