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Is there a git diff which shows this going in?
Apparently it’s not in the original repo, but in a build script in a distribution tar.
OpenSSH signatures in general contain signer's public key, which I personally think it's not weird but rather cool since it allows verifying the signature without out of the band key delivery (like in OpenPGP). The authentication of the public key is a separate subject but at least some basic checks can be done with an OpenSSH signature only.
If that's true, then I am 100% certain that this backdoor is from a nation state-level actor.
I already felt like this was way too sophisticated for a random cybercriminal. It's not like making up fake internet identities is very difficult, but someone has pretended to be a good-faith contributor for ages, in a surprisingly long-term operation. You need some funding and a good reason to pull off something like that. This could also be a ransomware group hoping to break into huge numbers of servers, though. Ra…
If that's true, then I am 100% certain that this backdoor is from a nation state-level actor.
It also seems like a convenient ground for a false flag operation: hijacking an account that belong to a trustworthy developer from another country.
So this basically means to scan for this exploit remotely we'd need the private key of the attacker which we don't have. Only other option is to run detection scripts locally. Yikes.
The backdoor's signature verification should cost around 100us, so keys matching the fingerprint should take that much longer to process than keys that do not match it. Detecting this timing difference should at least be realistic over LAN, perhaps even over the internet, especially if the scanner runs from a location close to the target. Systems that ban the client's IP after repeated authentication failures will probably be harder to scan.
(https://bench.cr.yp.to/results-sign.html lists Ed448 verification at around 400k cycles, which at 4GHz amounts to 100us)
Unpopular opinion, but I cannot but admire the whole operation. Condemn it of course, but still admire it. It was a piece of art! From conception to execution, masterful! We got extremely lucky that it was caught so early.
I agree, but the social engineering parts do feel particularly cruel
Though… do we know that the maintainer at that point was the same individual as the one who started the project? Goes deep, man.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently it’s not in the original repo, but in a build script in a distribution tar.
They also used social engineering to disable fuzzing which would have caught the discrepancy: https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz/pull/10667
I’m like.. bro, adding reaction emojis after the fact as if that makes any sort of difference to anything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I already felt like this was way too sophisticated for a random cybercriminal. It's not like making up fake internet identities is very difficult, but someone has pretended to be a good-faith contributor for ages, in a surprisingly long-term operation. You need some funding and a good reason to pull off something like that. This could also be a ransomware group hoping to break into huge numbers of servers, though. Ra…
Whoever this was is going after a government or a crypto exchange. Don't think anything else merits this effort.
Don't underestimate the drive some people have to make a buck.