Malicious code planted in xz Utils has been circulating for more than a month.

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.

  • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1211·
    8 months ago

    You’re making a logical fallacy called affirming the consequent where you’re assuming that just because the backdoor was caught under these particular conditions, these are the only conditions under which it would’ve been caught.

    No, I’m actually making that comment based on a career as a software developer, who has actually worked on a few open source projects before.

      • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.worldEnglish
        22·
        8 months ago

        What, experience doesn’t matter?

        As Groucho Marx would say, “I can believe you, or my lying eyes”.

          • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.worldEnglish
            22·
            8 months ago

            Experience doesn’t matter if you don’t read Wikipedia links given to you by random people :)

            You’re assuming I don’t already know what’s being discussed in the link (or have read the link), but disagree with how it’s being applied to me.

            Also, experience doesn’t evaporate into the ether just because someone does not read a link. That’s a fallacy for sure.

              • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.worldEnglish
                21·
                8 months ago

                And you’re assuming that I’m assuming that you’re assuming. /s

                Any particular reason why you’re getting on my case?

                  • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.worldEnglish
                    3·
                    8 months ago

                    Because the way this conversation started was a logical fallacy you weren’t aware of.

                    You’re assuming I’m not aware of the point you’re bringing up, again. I am, I’m disagreeing with you and how you’re trying to apply it to me.

                    You’re dragging it too. I know now, you are not one to learn. But can you at least learn from this and move on?

                    Defending oneself is not ‘dragging it too’. I’m literally replying to you stating that I am aware of the point you’re stating repeatedly that I’m not aware of, but that I just disagree with you and how you’re applying that point to me.

                    But instead of inquiring as to why I disagree, you’re just repeating back more of the same thing.

                    Let’s just agree to disagree on whether the point you’re trying to make applies to me or not, and we both move on. It’s such a trivial thing for you to keep hammering me on, it makes me wonder if you’re just a conflict bot.