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What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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Programming
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Incredible, just incredible. I am looking forward to the upcoming time when we know more about exactly how it works.
Yeah it sounds pretty wild already with some kind of, like, door knock mechanism using certificates? So you can't scan for it. And some reverse engineering countermeasures.
Like everyone else, I have to wonder what libraries have been compromised in a way that nobody has noticed yet.
Yeah, that's the scariest part. This was caught, but are there other projects out there that have been attacked with similar methods that no one knows about?
I have a feeling there are a lot of busy people trying to answer that question, now. Yikes.
There's also the ones known by very few people. There's companies and unofficial groups of people who collect and sell this information. Usually to state governments, off records.
I don't think it's the case for Linux, but I occasionally follow the state of things for bounties offered by Google and Apple to white hat hackers. Though this case is clearly malicious, I understand most vulnerabilities can easily pass as a bug/mistake.
From what I've read is not authentication bypass, it's a RCE using certificates to deliver the payload. If a specific signature is found it runs the code that was sent in place of the signing public key. It also means that only someone who has the ability to generate that specific key signature could use the RCE.
There were some other bits that looked like they could have been placed to enable compromising other build systems in the future when they checked for xz support.