Open Source

30789 readers

720 users here now

All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!

Useful Links

Rules

Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

452

XZ Hack - "If this timeline is correct, it’s not the modus operandi of a hobbyist. [...] It wouldn’t be surprising if it was paid for by a state actor." (lcamtuf.substack.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

72 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Thought this was a good read exploring some how the "how and why" including several apparent sock puppet accounts that convinced the original dev (Lasse Collin) to hand over the baton.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

no, the solution is not to pay someone to have someone to blame if shit happens.

there are a bus load of people involved on the way from a git repo to actuall stuff running on a machine and everyone in that chain is responsible to have an eye on what stuff they are building/packaging/installing/running and if something seems off, it's their responsibility to investigate and communicate with each other.

attacks like this will not be solved by paying someone to read source code, because the code in the repo might not be what is going to run on a machine or might look absolutely fine in a vacuum or will be altered by some other part in the chain. and even if you have dedicated code readers, you cant be sure that they are not compromised or that their findings will reach the people running/packaging/depending on the software.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Of course you can’t be sure anyone involved, paid or not, isn’t compromised. But if you want more human effort put into a project, people need a reason to do so. Complaining that volunteer contributors don’t spend enough of their time and effort with no compensation isn’t going to solve anything. Maybe AI tools will make that work more available in the near future.