this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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I have been reading about this since the news broke and still can't fully wrap my head around how it works. What an impressive level of sophistication.
And due to open source, it was still caught within a month. Nothing could ever convince me more than that how secure FOSS can be.
Idk if that's the right takeaway, more like 'oh shit there's probably many of these long con contributors out there, and we just happened to catch this one because it was a little sloppy due to the 0.5s thing'
This shit got merged. Binary blobs and hex digit replacements. Into low level code that many things use. Just imagine how often there's no oversight at all
Yes, and the moment this broke other project maintainers are working on finding exploits now. They read the same news we do and have those same concerns.
Very generous to imagine that maintainers have so much time on their hands
Bug fixes can be delayed for a security sweep. One of the quicker ways that come to mind is checking the hash between built from source and the tarball
The whole point here is that the build process was infiltrated - so you'd have to remake the build system yourself to compare, and that's not a task that can be automated
I wonder if anyone is doing large scale searches for source releases that differ in meaningful ways from their corresponding public repos.
It's probably tough due to autotools and that sort of thing.
I was literally compiling this library a few nights ago and didn't catch shit. We caught this one but I'm sure there's a bunch of "bugs" we've squashes over the years long after they were introduced that were working just as intended like this one.
The real scary thing to me is the notion this was state sponsored and how many things like this might be hanging out in proprietary software for years on end.