The malicious changes were submitted by JiaT75, one of the two main xz Utils developers with years of contributions to the project.
“Given the activity over several weeks, the committer is either directly involved or there was some quite severe compromise of their system,” an official with distributor OpenWall wrote in an advisory. “Unfortunately the latter looks like the less likely explanation, given they communicated on various lists about the ‘fixes’” provided in recent updates. Those updates and fixes can be found here, here, here, and here.
On Thursday, someone using the developer’s name took to a developer site for Ubuntu to ask that the backdoored version 5.6.1 be incorporated into production versions because it fixed bugs that caused a tool known as Valgrind to malfunction.
“This could break build scripts and test pipelines that expect specific output from Valgrind in order to pass,” the person warned, from an account that was created the same day.
One of maintainers for Fedora said Friday that the same developer approached them in recent weeks to ask that Fedora 40, a beta release, incorporate one of the backdoored utility versions.
“We even worked with him to fix the valgrind issue (which it turns out now was caused by the backdoor he had added),” the Ubuntu maintainer said.
He has been part of the xz project for two years, adding all sorts of binary test files, and with this level of sophistication, we would be suspicious of even older versions of xz until proven otherwise.
Long game supply chain attacks, pretty much going to be state actors. And I wouldn’t chalk it up to the usual malicious ones like China and Russia. This could be the NSA just as easily.
I honestly think the NSA has changed. If you look at the known backdoors they haven’t got caught making any new backdoors since like 2010. Their MO also seems to be more hardware and encryption (more of an observational charter) than manipulation.
There’s also evidence US Congress acted to stop the NSA from doing these underhanded tacits at least once https://www.wired.com/story/nsa-backdoors-closed/
They’re not idiots, lots of smart people there that surely understand the risk of something like this to US national security interests. It’s not the NSA that’s been asking for encryption to be broken in recent years. They’ve been warning about quantum threats and … from what I’m aware of actually been taking on the defensive role they were conducted to perform https://gizmodo.com/nsa-plans-to-act-now-to-ensure-quantum-computers-cant-b-1757038212
This seems like something that could actually be weaponized against predominantly western technology companies so I’d be very surprised if it was them and very surprised if they used someone that appears to be a Chinese born resident to do it.
I really can’t believe they’ve stopped. Their mentality is “national security has no morals”. They’ll do everything they can do to facilitate that mission, though not getting caught is a big part of the facade they need to put on to keep or renovate their image to do this.
Maybe they’re being more careful, and doing simple things like putting in timestamps that emulate working hours in other timezones are certainly the first thing they’re going to think about. That one has always cracked me up, security researchers point to it like it’s proof of something, which is ridiculous. Just like our people are smart, I don’t think the foreign actors are dumb either.
And before you say it, I’d be all over not being paranoid if it hadn’t been proven to me time and again that these agencies won’t change, that they don’t give a shit about what’s right if it gets in the way of their mandate. The only thing that might change is how well they hide things now and intimidate their people into staying quiet. Because potential whistleblowers have seen the examples that have been made.
Personally I suspect they’re getting all the information they care about via subpoenas on big data and social media companies. They don’t have a need to compromise security on a technical level anymore because the justice system itself is compromised. That means backdoors only benefit national enemies at this point, so the NSA of today would rather those not exist at all.
Of course that’s not to say anyone should trust those agencies at their word on anything.
Backdoors at a mation-state level are a double edged sword. In order to successfully implement a backdoor, you need to ensure that you are more clever than your adversaries, because those same backdoors can be used against you. You must assume that they will eventually discover them, and be able to leverage them against you. Then you must be able to identify that it had been compromised, and then “responsibly disclose” the vulnerability before too much damage is done.
Much better to be on the defensive. Discover 0days first, either accidental or intentional, and then use them until someone else discloses them and they get patched to hell.
In this instance, that’s not the case. Only those in possession of the right key can use the backdoor. Also, discovering infected systems from the outside, appears to be impossible - the backdoor simply does not do anything to reveal itself if you don’t have the key.
I must be mistaken then. I suppose keys have never, ever been compromised. Nobody has ever taken sensitive information without authorization, either. Especially not from the NSA!
You were talking about adversaries discovering the backdoor. That’s something entirely different from compromised keys. So your sacrasm is quite misplaced here.
Columbus “discovered” America.
That’s not true, Shadow broker leaks for example contained 0-day found by the NSA well after 2010. And that’s only what got published, there’s probably more !
There is a difference from finding something you can take advantage of and putting it there though, no? This sounds like the former.
But still, it’s a good point, thanks.
Ah sorry, english is not my native language so I’m not sure I fully got what you meant, your point was that they stopped inserting backdoors and instead concentrated on getting access by finding vulnerabilities ?
Basically two points, they stopped inserting backdoors and their backdoors seem to have only ever been to show them what’s going on (so this just doesn’t look like them to me).
I didn’t really comment on “what they do now” as much. I think they do continue to spy, finding preexisting vulnerabilities is definitely one way to spy. I wouldn’t be surprised if they report the worst ones in NATO systems to be repaired and keep the others for themselves.
They also tap into weak points like Google and Apple’s notification services where things aren’t end to end encrypted to gather information. I believe this was revealed recently.
Snowden I recall saying the modern NSA is more interested in metadata than what’s actually in the message as well.
In general, I think they still do some shady stuff, but I don’t think they do shady stuff that risks compromising a system. This exploit is quite literally a system compromise as (if I understand it correctly) it allows bypassing sshd authentication.
I remember 2013 backdoored crypto by NSA. If they get caught less doesn’t mean they make less backdoors.
EIDT: it was discovered in 2007 and revoked as standard in 2014
Also they owned corporation that made backdoored crypto algos till 2018. And the only reason they stopped is FOIA.
I don’t know man. Imagine you could have ssh access to every Debian and fedora server on the planet, and all you had to do was write tests for some compression library for 2 years and sneak in a clever patch. I’d guess such an exploit is worth millions. You wouldn’t work 2 years for millions of dollars?
This is sophisticated but it doesn’t have to be a state actor.
Yup. I think it’s an independent hacker, probably hired by a state actor, but not a state actor themselves.
My understanding is that state actors generally look for exploits, not create them. I also think they’d be a little more clever than this.
If you throw enough money at the right person you can get shit done.
I think you are greatly underestimating FSB incompetense.