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

Hopefully this does not affect you but if you are running something like Arch, OpenSUSE tumbleweed, Debian sid or Fedora Rawhide and use SSH for remote access you should do a full wipe.

  • @[email protected]
    7•9 months ago

    Wow, thank you for sharing this! Grumblegrumble have to reinstall my system…

    This straight on the back of a thread about flatpak verification and security - a reminder that a lot of the incredible work of a distribution, especially Debian, is a community of people curating packages with care, and not just for how quick they can be made to work together.

    Also a highlight for the work toward fully replicatable systems - if I understand right, the exploit here was snuck in in the binary, not in the source code.

    • Nyfure
      5•9 months ago

      Well you only have to reinstall if you had affected versions installed.
      For e.g. Debian stable, thats not the case. Or e.g. Arch sshd doesnt link to xz, so thats not a concern there.

      Most systems wont be affected because their sshd doesnt link xz, didnt update to that version yet or simply isnt accessible from the outside.
      Though it does show how vulnerable critical packages can be and how much better we need to protect them.

    • @[email protected]
      3•9 months ago

      No, it was snuck into the website download of the source code. If you got it from GitHub it was fine, if you got it from their website you got pwnd

      • @[email protected]
        4•9 months ago

        That’s not correct as far as I can tell. The backdoored code ended up in release tarballs (but not source tarballs because of autoconf fuckery), see eg. this mailing list discussion.