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

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

192 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.

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[–] [email protected] 81 points 7 months ago (17 children)

Long game supply chain attacks, pretty much going to be state actors. And I wouldn't chalk it up to the usual malicious ones like China and Russia. This could be the NSA just as easily.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 7 months ago (12 children)

I honestly think the NSA has changed. If you look at the known backdoors they haven't got caught making any new backdoors since like 2010. Their MO also seems to be more hardware and encryption (more of an observational charter) than manipulation.

There's also evidence US Congress acted to stop the NSA from doing these underhanded tacits at least once https://www.wired.com/story/nsa-backdoors-closed/

They're not idiots, lots of smart people there that surely understand the risk of something like this to US national security interests. It's not the NSA that's been asking for encryption to be broken in recent years. They've been warning about quantum threats and ... from what I'm aware of actually been taking on the defensive role they were conducted to perform https://gizmodo.com/nsa-plans-to-act-now-to-ensure-quantum-computers-cant-b-1757038212

This seems like something that could actually be weaponized against predominantly western technology companies so I'd be very surprised if it was them and very surprised if they used someone that appears to be a Chinese born resident to do it.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 7 months ago (6 children)

I really can't believe they've stopped. Their mentality is "national security has no morals". They'll do everything they can do to facilitate that mission, though not getting caught is a big part of the facade they need to put on to keep or renovate their image to do this.

Maybe they're being more careful, and doing simple things like putting in timestamps that emulate working hours in other timezones are certainly the first thing they're going to think about. That one has always cracked me up, security researchers point to it like it's proof of something, which is ridiculous. Just like our people are smart, I don't think the foreign actors are dumb either.

And before you say it, I'd be all over not being paranoid if it hadn't been proven to me time and again that these agencies won't change, that they don't give a shit about what's right if it gets in the way of their mandate. The only thing that might change is how well they hide things now and intimidate their people into staying quiet. Because potential whistleblowers have seen the examples that have been made.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Personally I suspect they're getting all the information they care about via subpoenas on big data and social media companies. They don't have a need to compromise security on a technical level anymore because the justice system itself is compromised. That means backdoors only benefit national enemies at this point, so the NSA of today would rather those not exist at all.

Of course that's not to say anyone should trust those agencies at their word on anything.

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