this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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There are two big problems with the point that you're trying to make:
There are many open source projects being run by organizations with as much (often stronger) governance over commit access as a private corporation would have over its closed source code base. The most widely used projects tend to fall under this category, like Linux, React, Angular, Go, JavaScript, and innumerable others. Governance models for a project are a very reasonable thing to consider when deciding whether to use a dependency for your application or library. There's a fair argument to be made that the governance model of this xz project should have been flagged sooner, and hopefully this incident will help stir broader awareness for that. But unlike a closed source code base, you can actually know the governance model and commit access model of open source software. When it comes to closed source software you don't know anything about the company's hiring practices, background checks, what access they might provide to outsourced agents from other countries who may be compromised, etc.
You're assuming that 100% of the source code used in a closed source project was developed by that company and according to the company's governance model, which you assume is a good one. In reality BSD/MIT licensed (and illegally GPL licensed) open source software is being shoved into closed source code bases all the time. The difference with closed source software is that you have no way of knowing that this is the case. For all you know some intern already shoved a compromised xz into some closed source software that you're using, and since that intern is gone now it will be years before anyone in the company notices that their software has a well known backdoor sitting in it.
None of what I'm saying is unique to the mechanics of open source. It's just that the open source ecosystem as it currently exists today has different attack surfaces than a closed source ecosystem.
At a certain point, though, that's outsourced to trust whoever someone else trusts. When I trust a specific distro (because I'm certainly not rolling my own distro), I'm trusting how they maintain their repos, as well as which packages they include by default. Then, each of those packages has dependencies, which in turn have dependencies. The nature of this kind of trust is that we select people one or two levels deep, and assume that they have vetted the dependencies another one or two levels, all the way down. XZ did something malicious with systemd, which opened a vulnerability in sshd, as compiled for certain distros.
Not at all. I'm very aware that some prior hacks by very sophisticated, probably state sponsored attackers have abused the chain of trust in proprietary software dependencies. Stuxnet relied on stolen private keys trusted by Windows for signing hardware drivers. The Solarwinds hack relied on compromising plugins trusted by Microsoft 365.
But my broader point is that there are simply more independent actors in the open source ecosystem. If a vulnerability takes the form of the weakest link, where compromising any one of the many independent links is enough to gain access, that broadly distributed ecosystem is more vulnerable. If a vulnerability requires chaining different things together so that multiple parts of the ecosystem are compromised, then distributing decisionmaking makes the ecosystem more robust. That's the tradeoff I'm describing, and making things spread too thin introduces the type of vulnerability that I'm describing.