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Backdoor found in widely used Linux utility breaks encrypted SSH connections (arstechnica.com)

submitted 7 months ago by Hubi@feddit.de to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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.

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[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 81 points 7 months ago (17 children)

Long game supply chain attacks, pretty much going to be state actors. And I wouldn't chalk it up to the usual malicious ones like China and Russia. This could be the NSA just as easily.

[–] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 34 points 7 months ago (12 children)

I honestly think the NSA has changed. If you look at the known backdoors they haven't got caught making any new backdoors since like 2010. Their MO also seems to be more hardware and encryption (more of an observational charter) than manipulation.

There's also evidence US Congress acted to stop the NSA from doing these underhanded tacits at least once https://www.wired.com/story/nsa-backdoors-closed/

They're not idiots, lots of smart people there that surely understand the risk of something like this to US national security interests. It's not the NSA that's been asking for encryption to be broken in recent years. They've been warning about quantum threats and ... from what I'm aware of actually been taking on the defensive role they were conducted to perform https://gizmodo.com/nsa-plans-to-act-now-to-ensure-quantum-computers-cant-b-1757038212

This seems like something that could actually be weaponized against predominantly western technology companies so I'd be very surprised if it was them and very surprised if they used someone that appears to be a Chinese born resident to do it.

[–] ElCanut@jlai.lu 13 points 7 months ago (1 children)

That's not true, Shadow broker leaks for example contained 0-day found by the NSA well after 2010. And that's only what got published, there's probably more !

[–] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

There is a difference from finding something you can take advantage of and putting it there though, no? This sounds like the former.

But still, it's a good point, thanks.

[–] ElCanut@jlai.lu 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Ah sorry, english is not my native language so I'm not sure I fully got what you meant, your point was that they stopped inserting backdoors and instead concentrated on getting access by finding vulnerabilities ?

[–] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 3 points 7 months ago

Basically two points, they stopped inserting backdoors and their backdoors seem to have only ever been to show them what's going on (so this just doesn't look like them to me).

I didn't really comment on "what they do now" as much. I think they do continue to spy, finding preexisting vulnerabilities is definitely one way to spy. I wouldn't be surprised if they report the worst ones in NATO systems to be repaired and keep the others for themselves.

They also tap into weak points like Google and Apple's notification services where things aren't end to end encrypted to gather information. I believe this was revealed recently.

Snowden I recall saying the modern NSA is more interested in metadata than what's actually in the message as well.

In general, I think they still do some shady stuff, but I don't think they do shady stuff that risks compromising a system. This exploit is quite literally a system compromise as (if I understand it correctly) it allows bypassing sshd authentication.

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