This is the best post I’ve read about it so far: https://boehs.org/node/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdoor
Damn, it is actually scary that they managed to pull this off. The backdoor came from the second-largest contributor to xz too, not some random drive-by.
They’ve been contributing to xz for two years, and commited various “test” binary files.
It’s looking more like a long game to compromise an upstream.
Either that or the attacker was very good at choosing their puppet…
Well the account is focused on one particular project which makes sense if you expect to get burned at some point and don’t want all your other exploits to be detected. It looks like there was a second sock puppet account involved in the original attack vector support code.
We should certainly audit other projects for similar changes from other psudoanonymous accounts.
Yeah, and the 700 commits should be reverted… just in case we missed something.
If you’re using
xzversion 5.6.0 or 5.6.1, please upgrade asap, especially if you’re using a rolling-release distro like Arch or its derivatives. Arch has rolled out the patched version a few hours ago.Backdoor only gets inserted when building RPM or DEB. So while updating frequently is a good idea, it won’t change anything for Arch users today.
I think that was a precaution. The malicious build script ran during the build, but the backdoor itself was most likely not included in the resuling package as it checked for specific packaging systems.
when building RPM or DEB.
Which ones? Everything I run seems to be clear.
https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2024-3094
Products / Services Components State Enterprise Linux 6 xz Not affected Enterprise Linux 7 xz Not affected Enterprise Linux 8 xz Not affected Enterprise Linux 9 xz Not affected (and thus all the bug-for-bug clones)
Those getting the most recent software versions, so nothing that should be running in a server.
Fedora 41, Fedora Rawhide, Debian Sid are the currently known affected ones AFAIK.
t y for sharing.
#showerthoughts The problem is in upstream and has only entered Debian Sid/unstable. Does this mean that for example bleeding edge Arch (btw) sshd users are compromised already ?
Looks like the 5.6.1-2 release on Arch moved from using the published GitHub releases to just using the git repository directly, which as I understand avoids the exploit (because the obfuscated script to inject the exploit is only present in the packaged tarballs and not the git repo itself)
They also believe we (Arch users) are unaffected because this backdoor targeted Debian and Redhat type packaging specifically and also relied on a certain SSH configuration Arch doesn’t use. To be honest while it’s nice to know we’re unaffected, it’s not at all comforting that had the exploiter targeted Arch they would have succeeded. Just yesterday I was talking to someone about how much I love rolling release distros and now I’m feeling insecure about it.
More details here: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/xz/-/issues/2
Someone always has to be the guinea pig.
That being said, maybe there’s an argument for distros that do rolling releases to have an “intentionally delayed rolling release” that just trails the regular rolling release by a fixed amount of time to provide more time for guinea pigs to run into things. If you want rolling, but can live with the delay, just use that.
OpenSuse Slowroll does pretty much that, a slightly delayed rolling release.
And you know what? Doing updates once a week saved me from updating to this version :)
I upgraded to 5.6.0-1 on the 28th Februar already. Over a month ago. On a server. That’s the first time Arch testing has fucked me so hard lol.
They noticed that some ssh sessions took 0.5 seconds too long under certain circumstances. 😲
Holy hell that’s good QA.
Well half a second delay is pretty noticeable when you ssh into a machine sitting right next to you. It should be instant. And if it isn’t something’s off.
