One of the takeaways from this to me is that there is way too much sketchy bullshit happening in critical system software. Prebuilt binary blobs [1]? Rewriting calls to SIMD enhanced versions at runtime [2]? Disabling sanitizers [3]? Incomprehensible build scripts [4]? All of this was either at least strongly frowned upon, if not outright unacceptable, on every project I've ever worked on, either professionally or fo…
XZ backdoor: "It's RCE, not auth bypass, and gated/unreplayable."
441–450 of 862 posts
Re: XZ backdoor: "It's RCE, not auth bypass, and gated/unreplayable."
#442As a de facto maintainer of an obscure open source game, I see devs come and go. I just merge all the worthwhile contributions. Some collaborators go pretty deep with their features, with a variety of coding styles, in a mishmash of C and C++. I'm not always across the implementation details, but in the back of my mind I'm thinking, man, anyone could just code up some real nasty backdoor and the project would be scre…
Re: XZ backdoor: "It's RCE, not auth bypass, and gated/unreplayable."
#443Imagine a future where state actors have hundreds of AI agents fixing bugs, gaining reputation while they slowly introduce backdoors. I really hope open source models succeed.
I work for a large closed-source software company and I can tell you with 100% that it is full of domestic and foreign agents. Being open source means that more eyes can and will look at something. That only increases the chance of malicious actions being found out ... just like this supply-chain attack.
Quoting from flawed memory:
Passenger: Which company?
Narrator: A large one.
Re: XZ backdoor: "It's RCE, not auth bypass, and gated/unreplayable."
#444If the RCE is Russian, it could be used a communication kill-switch on the morning of an attack outside Ukraine, similar to the Viasat hack https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viasat_hack
Re: XZ backdoor: "It's RCE, not auth bypass, and gated/unreplayable."
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
dont you think that something as simple as a CLA (contributor legal agreement) would prevent this type of thing? of course creates noise in the open source contribution funnel, but let's be honest: if you are dedicating yourself to something like contributing to oss, signing a CLA should not be something unrealistic.
CLA is not an ID check. It is to handover the rights for the code over to the project owners rather than doing any identity check.
Re: XZ backdoor: "It's RCE, not auth bypass, and gated/unreplayable."
#446As a de facto maintainer of an obscure open source game, I see devs come and go. I just merge all the worthwhile contributions. Some collaborators go pretty deep with their features, with a variety of coding styles, in a mishmash of C and C++. I'm not always across the implementation details, but in the back of my mind I'm thinking, man, anyone could just code up some real nasty backdoor and the project would be scre…
dont you think that something as simple as a CLA (contributor legal agreement) would prevent this type of thing? of course creates noise in the open source contribution funnel, but let's be honest: if you are dedicating yourself to something like contributing to oss, signing a CLA should not be something unrealistic.
Or do you think they don’t have the resources to fake an identity?
Re: XZ backdoor: "It's RCE, not auth bypass, and gated/unreplayable."
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
dont you think that something as simple as a CLA (contributor legal agreement) would prevent this type of thing? of course creates noise in the open source contribution funnel, but let's be honest: if you are dedicating yourself to something like contributing to oss, signing a CLA should not be something unrealistic.
What exactly is a CLA going to do to a CCP operative (as appears to be the case with xz)? Do you think the party is going to extradite one of their state sponsored hacking groups because they got caught trying to implement a backdoor? Or do you think they don’t have the resources to fake an identity?
Re: XZ backdoor: "It's RCE, not auth bypass, and gated/unreplayable."
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
CLA is not an ID check. It is to handover the rights for the code over to the project owners rather than doing any identity check.
agreed. but it does not mean i couldn't be. as per the terms, the content of a CLA could be anything. and that's my point
Re: XZ backdoor: "It's RCE, not auth bypass, and gated/unreplayable."
#449The questions this backdoor raises: - what other ones exist by this same team or similar teams? - how many such teams are operating? - how many such dependencies are vulnerable to such infiltration attacks? what is our industry’s attack surface for such covert operations? I think making a graph of all major network services (apache httpd, postgres, mysql, nginx, openssh, dropbear ssh, haproxy, varnish, caddy, squid,…
Re: XZ backdoor: "It's RCE, not auth bypass, and gated/unreplayable."
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's my point though--users expect to be able to do those things over ssh. Sandboxing sshd is hard because its child processes are expected to be able to do anything that an admin sitting at the console could do, up to and including reading/writing kernel memory.
I'm assuming SSH root login is disabled and sudo requires separate authentication to elevate, but yeah, if there's a way to elevate yourself to unconfined root trivially after logging in, this doesn't buy you anything. Now, sandboxing sudo (in the general case) with SELinux probably isn't possible.
sshd is a sitting duck. Bifurcating sshd into a multimodule scheme won't work because some part of it still has to be loaded by systemd.
This is a web of trust issue. In the .NET world where refection attacks happen to commercial software that features dynload assemblies, the only solution they could come up with is to sign all the things, then box up anything that doesn't have a signing mechanism and then sign that, even signing plain old zip files.
Some day we will all have to have keys, and to keep the anon people from leaving they can get an anon key, but anons with keys will never get on the chain where the big distros would ever trust their commits until someone who forked over their passport and photos got a trustable key to sign off on the commits, so that the distro builders can then greenlight pulling it in.
Then I guess to keep the anons hopeful that they are still in the SDLC somewhere their commits can go into the completely untrusted-unstable-crazytown release that no instutution in their right mind would ever lay down in production.