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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] 98 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (57 children)

From the article...

Will Dormann, a senior vulnerability analyst at security firm Analygence, said in an online interview. “BUT that's only because it was discovered early due to bad actor sloppiness. Had it not been discovered, it would have been catastrophic to the world.”

Is auditing for security reasons ever done on any open source code? Is everyone just assuming that everyone else is doing it, and hence no one is really doing it?

EDIT: I'm not attacking open source, I'm a big believer in open source.

I'm just trying to start a conversation about a potential flaw that needs to be addressed.

Once the conversation was started I was going to expand the conversation by suggesting an open source project that does security audits on other open source projects.

Please put the pitchforks away.

Edit2: This is not encouraging.

[–] [email protected] 61 points 7 months ago (48 children)

You're making a logical fallacy called affirming the consequent where you're assuming that just because the backdoor was caught under these particular conditions, these are the only conditions under which it would've been caught.

Suppose the bad actor had not been sloppy; it would still be entirely possible that the backdoor gets identified and fixed during a security audit performed by an enterprise grade Linux distribution.

In this case it was caught especially early because the bad actor did not cover their tracks very well, but now that that has occurred, it cannot necessarily be proven one way or the other whether the backdoor would have been caught by other means.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (11 children)

You’re making a logical fallacy called affirming the consequent where you’re assuming that just because the backdoor was caught under these particular conditions, these are the only conditions under which it would’ve been caught.

No, I'm actually making that comment based on a career as a software developer, who has actually worked on a few open source projects before.