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.
From the article…
The fact that it was discovered early due to bad actor sloppiness does not imply that it could not have also been caught prior to wide spread usage via security audits that take place for many enterprise grade Linux distributions.
I think it does though. They call it sloppy, I call it sophisticated. Same reason they major distro is running checking shit out right now.
Opensource = fast detection
Opensource + sloppiness = faster detection
Closedsource = never detected
Closedsource + sloppiness = maybe detected
You can put the pom-poms/rifle down, I’m not attacking open source, not in the slightest. I’m a big believer open source.
But I also know that volunteer work is not always as rigorous as when paid for work is being done.
The only point I’m trying to make in this conversation is getting confirmation if security audits are actually done, or if everyone just thinks they’re done because of “Open Source” reasons.