this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
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Because people have the opposite experience and outlook from what you wrote.
I’m one of those people.
I’m surprised no one brought up the xz thing.
Debian specifically targeted by complex and nuanced multi prong attack involving social engineering and very good obfuscation. Defeated because stable (12 stable, mind you, not even 11 which is still in lots of use) was so slow that the attack was found in unstable.
This is not a good argument imo. It was a miracle that xz vulnerability was found so fast, and should not be assumed as standard. The developer had been contributing to the codebase for 2 years, and their code already landed in debian stable iirc. There's still no certainty that that code had no vulnerabilities. Some vulnerabilities in the past were caught decades after their introduction.
Its not a miracle it is just probability. When you have enough eyes on something you are bound to catch bugs and problems.
Debian holds back because its primary goal is to be stable, reliable and consistent. It has been around longer that pretty much everything else and it can run for decades without issue. I read a article about a university that still had the original Debian install from the 90's. It was on newer hardware but they just copied over the files.
Lots of eyes is not enough. As I mentioned earlier, there are many popular programs found on most machines, and some actually user facing (unlike xz) where vulnerabilities were caught months, years, and sometimes decades later. xz is an exception, not a rule.
I was running 12 stable on a machine that had been updated and upgraded in between the time when the backdoor was introduced and when it was discovered. At no point in time did either dpkg query or the self report show that system had the affected 5.6.0(?) version.
Stable had versions of xz that contained commits from the attacker and has been walked back to before those were made out of an abundance of caution.
There’s a lot of eyes on that software now and I haven’t seen anyone report that versions between the attacker gaining commit rights and the attacked version were compromised yet, as you said though: that doesn’t mean it isn’t and vulnerabilities have existed for many years without being discovered.
As to whether it’s a good argument, vulnerabilities have a short lifespan generally. Just hanging back and waiting a little while for something to crop up is usually enough to avoid them. If you don’t believe me, check the nist database.
I’m gonna sound like a goober here, but the easiest way to not trip is to slow down and look where you’re going.
If that is a good tradeoff for you, old/broken packages but more trusted, then that's okay. Btw, the xz backdoor was found so quickly it didn't even ship to most distros in use, except for Debian Sid and Arch I think
I see it as a fantastic trade off. There are some packages I use that need to be more up to date than stable repos and I either install them from different repos or in a different way.
And arch never even had the whole backdoor because they built from source and didn’t include the poison pill binary component from the attacker.