Explain Like I'm Five

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ELI5: The Linux xz backdoor situation (pawb.social)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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PLEASE. I keep seeing it in memes. As I understand it the latest version of the xz package (present in rolling release distros like Arch and SUSE Tumbleweed) has "a backdoor", but I have no earthly clue what can be done by malicious folks with access to that backdoor or if I should be afraid or how to check if my distro is compromised or how to prevent damage if it is or (...)

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Right now the exploit is not fully understood.

How so, btw? The original maintainer and everyone else can read the changed code, so how can it not be fully understood? Is it that heavily obfuscated, or...?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

The backdoor was not contained within the source code, but within precompiled binary blobs sent "downstream" from the maintainer, this is often done so that end users get a leaner version of the software without development tool chains attached, which also makes automated checking of these blobs difficult to impossible so instead we rely on verified and trusted upstream maintainers to be "good actors". That's the reason this is such a big wakeup call, as it's a maintainer that worked on projects and waited for years before trying to push this through.