this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
51 points (71.1% liked)
Linux
48634 readers
1587 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I understand the concern raised, but unless I'm reading this wrong there is an assumption that Ventoy may be doing something untoward, but I'm not sure how at this level. It can't inject anything into the ISO files at rest without bricking then, and I don't know if an OS that doesn't verify it's own image before booting.
Just sounds like super lazy project administration. Maybe I'm missing something?
The xz issue is something totally different though. That was a software library running and executing against flat files. I'm just not sure there's a way to alter an ISO image before boot, undetected in the case of Ventoy.
If the goal is to alter files to provide access to something, this must be some sort of ingenious way that bypasses checksums, and targets something universal, which doesn't seem quite possible in the case of a substitute bootloader.
Yeah, it would be really big. I wouldn't have posted about this if it weren't for the radio silence and balbbering statement.
As far as I can tell, this is not talking about ISOs installed using Ventoy, but precompiled blobs of things like Busybox that are included in the Ventoy install package. It's an important distinction. The developer could bundle a tampered blob, include in the documentation the checksum that matches that blob, and then if someone checks with the upstream project and calls them out, say something along the lines of, "Oh, they must have withdrawn that release," and replace it with an untampered blob. If they don't fight to preserve the tampered blob, they might even get away with it.
The claim of the person you're replying to is that even if the binaries were tampered, Ventoy wouldn't be able to do anything.
Even if the original issue had anything to do with ISOs, he's way overestimating the level of protection on many install ISOs, in my experience—they're just disk images, and presumably all the files read off them are passing through Ventoy itself. Even if you find one that performs some kind of verification, easy enough to change a jump instruction to a no-op somewhere in the machine code guts of a file as it passes through Ventoy, and prevent the verification from executing. (The difficult part is figuring out which instruction to change, but people have done it before.)
No, I'm saying the way ISOs are written, you couldn't just, say, inject changes via text tools or whatever like the xz attack.
I'm not aware of HOW a binary blob not knowing specifically what it was going to attack COULD attack anything in a resting and isolated state like it would be with Ventoy.