Backdoor found in widely used Linux utility targets encrypted SSH connections
arstechnica.com
Malicious code planted in xz Utils has been circulating for more than a month.

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.

  • 5C5C5C@programming.devEnglish
    01·
    8 months ago

    The key sentence in the post you linked which constituted more than 50% of the words being stated by the poster and yet you somehow conveniently missed which completely negates the whole narrative that you’re trying to promote:

    Speaking as an open source maintainer, if a tech company would like to pay me to do ~anything for my open source project, we can sit down and talk about my rates.

    Which means this person is NOT simply a volunteer as you insinuated here:

    When someone suggested a level of effort to be put on code checked in to prevent security issues from happening, the maintainer pushed back, stating that they will decide what level of effort they’ll put in, because they’re doing the work on a volunteer basis.

    but in fact is available to be paid a fair rate for the labor they perform. In fact your entire description of the post is mischaracterizing what is being said in the post.

    I don’t know how you could have accidentally missed or misinterpreted one of the two sentences being said by the poster, and the longer of the two sentences at that. It was also the first sentence in the poster’s statement. It seems more likely to me that you missed that on purpose rather than by accident. Maybe you’re just so eager to find evidence to match your narrative that your brain registered the entire point of the post incorrectly. Allow me to reframe what’s being said to simplify the matter:

    As a self-employed contractor, if you demand that I perform free labor for you, I will decline that request.

    Now just add a much more frustrated tone to the above and you get the post you linked.