“Engineers have been circulating an old, famous-among-programmers web comic about how all modern digital infrastructure rests on a project maintained by some random guy in Nebraska. (In their telling, Mr. Freund is the random guy from Nebraska.)”
That’s not quite right. Lasse Collin is the random guy in Nebraska. Freund is the guy that noticed the whole thing was about to topple.
and that one guy (Lasse) was burnt out and pressured [by jia?] to step back and let jia be the person that the whole internet infrastructure relied upon
I suspect this was just a lucky catch of shit that happens all the time. Supply chain attacks are super scary and effectively impossible to eliminate in modern software development.
It’s almost impossible to spot by people looking directly at the code. I’m honestly surprised this one was discovered at all. People are still trying to deconstruct this exploit to figure out how the RCE worked.
And supply chain attacks are effectively impossible to eliminate as an attack vector by a developer-user of a N-level dependency. Not having dependencies or auditing every dependency is unreasonable in most cases.
There are sysadmins that discover a major vulnerabilities though troubleshooting
The key is the number of people involved
People are still trying to deconstruct this exploit to figure out how the RCE worked.
True, but we do know how it got into xz in the first place. Human error and bad practice, we wouldn’t have to reverse engineer the exploit if xz didn’t allow binary commits all together. It’s a very convoluted exploit with hiding “junk” and using awk and other commands to cut around that junk and combining it creating a payload and executing it. Our reliance on binary blobs is a double edged sword.
supply chain attacks are effectively impossible to eliminate as an attack vector by a developer-user of a N-level dependency. Not having dependencies or auditing every dependency is unreasonable in most cases.
Also true, because human error is impossible to snuff out completely, however it can be reduced if companies donated to the projects they use. For example, Microsoft depends on XZ and doesn’t donate them anything. It’s free as in freedom not cost. Foss devs aren’t suppliers, it comes as is. If you want improvements in the software your massive company relies on, then donate, otherwise don’t expect anything, they aren’t your slaves.
Right now the greatest level of supply chain secuirty that I know of is formal verification, source reproducible builds, and full source bootstrapping build systems. There was a neat FPGA bootstrapping proj3ct (the whole toolchain to program the fpga could be built on the FPGA) at last years FOSDEMs conference, and I have to admit the idea of a physically verifiable root of trust is super exciting to me, but also out of reach for 98% of projects (though more possible by the day).
So, Microsoft saved everyone from the bad Linux then?
/s
“Linux saved itself.”
- having FOSS code
- being able to silence all system services to detect that bump
- being able to run stuff in different ways, without a core system component (with and without systemd, as that backdoor only used data when sshd was started via systemd)
- having people be perfectionist about performance measurements
- having devs test upstream code not shipped to normal distros
- being so good microsoft pays people to work on software for it
A nerd who was benchmarking their ssh connection saved it…I love everything about that fello
You’re late to the party NYT.
Also, dude made a good save. Only arch users got hit lol
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The hack mainly targeted Debian and fedora
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Arch doesn’t directly link openssh to liblzma, so the hack doesn’t affect arch users.
Do you know the exploit was detected in Debian Sid? (by a PostgreSQL developer), Arch got the update (with both compromised versions), but because don’t directly link openssh to liblzma (as Debian), and thus this attack vector is not possible.
Also, other rolling distros also got the compromised versions, maybe: openSUSE Tumbleweed, Endeavour OS, Fedora Rawhide, Slackware -current, etc.
Fedora 40 testing branch and rawhide got it as well, as well tumbleweed and debian sid
And how many people actually use those? Arch got hit the hardest
Ok that’s a bad joke. The exploit targeted Debian, Ubuntu and RHEL
Well, I had to solve three CAPTCHA puzzles before getting through to the page itself, so I figured to insert that link.
