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.

  • Cosmic ClericEnglish
    1•9 months ago

    Your interpretation is simply not supported by the literal words being said by the person. “we can sit down and talk about my rates” implies that this person already has rates that they charge for the labor they do.

    A reminder of the actual tweet…

    “tech companies […] started calling on open-source maintainers to beef up project governance. […] mandatory two-person code reviews, self-assessments, SLAs, and written succession plans.”

    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. Otherwise they can fuck right off and I’m going to do what I want with my project.

    The point is not what the actual dollar amount would be, the point is distinguishing volunteer work that is currently being done for free versus future paid work that would be done, and to be able to dictate terms and how the work is to be done (security checks, etc.).

    So at this point, I disagree with what you are saying, and I stand by what I’ve said.

    Further, it’s not worth my time discussing this further with you in particular. Apparently we live in two different realities, and you’re completely knowledgeable about open source, where you know for a fact that I am not. Kind of hard the bridge that gap, conversationally. But at the end of the day, I can believe you, or my lying eyes (to quote Groucho Marx).

    And actually at this point, after having spoken with you, especially with your latest comment where you stated what work you do/did for open source, I’m more fearful for open source codebases than I was before. Open source developers who take things personally, and with a ‘can do no wrong’ mindset, they just set themselves up for more security attacks.

    Have a nice day.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•9 months ago

      Nothing about the portion of the sentence you highlight actually implies that they haven’t already been getting paid to do open source work. That’s an interpretation that you’re projecting onto the sentence because it fits your narrative. The poster never identified themself to be a volunteer. I’ve already reframed the sentence for you in a previous post, but I’ll try one more time: “Whenever any tech company is willing to pay me to do work related to my open source project, I sit down with them and talk about my rates” is a semantically equivalent sentence to what the poster said.

      You’re also taking one single datapoint which has ambiguous credibility to begin with and extrapolating it to characterize a massive industry that you, like countless others, benefit from while hardly knowing anything about how the sausage gets made.

      I’d be surprised if you’ve ever offered a substantive contribution to an open source project in your life, so I won’t be losing any sleep if a freeloader loses confidence in the ecosystem. But realistically you’ll be using open source software for the rest of your life because the reality is that closed source software really can’t compete in terms of scale, impact, and accessibility. If you actually care about the quality and security of the things you depend on, then do something about it. And prattling ignorance on social media does not count as doing something.

      • Cosmic ClericEnglish
        1•9 months ago

        Sorry, realize I told you I was done with our conversation, but after doing so I stumbled upon this video, and thought I would share it with you, as its pertinent to the issue we were discussing.

        You keep arguing that open source projects are strict with their code base reviews and such and are as reliable as close sourced products, and I keep seeing others saying that they are not suppliers, and everything is “as is”. We can’t both be right.

        I don’t plan on responding to you if you reply to this comment, as IMHO it would be a waste of time, as you’ll just twist this video so that its saying the opposite of what its actually saying.

        • @[email protected]English
          1•9 months ago

          You keep arguing that open source projects are strict with their code base reviews

          Go ahead and quote the words I said that suggest this. You have a talent for claiming that people have said things they have never actually said.

          The only claims I’ve made in this conversation are:

          1. The open source ecosystem does NOT strictly rely on confidence in individual project maintainers because audits and remedial measures are always possible, and done more often than most people are aware of. Of course this could and should be done more often. And maybe it would if we didn’t have so many non-contributing freeloaders in the community.
          2. Most of the widely used open source projects are not being done by hobbyists or volunteers but rather by professionals who are getting paid for their work, either via a salary or by commission as independent contractors.
          3. You don’t seem to have a firm grasp on how open source software is actually developed and managed in general.