Comment on How does the xz incident impacts the average user ? #xz

neatchee@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Quick summary:

liblzma is a library for the lzma compression format. Loosely, this means it’s used by various other pieces of software that need this type of compression, rather than being an application itself.

It is very widely used. It comes installed on most major Linux distributions and is used by software like openssh, one of the standard remote connection packages.

However, since it was only in the tarball, you wouldn’t see it widely until debian, fedora, et al release a new version that includes the latest liblzma updates. This version hadn’t been added to any of the stable release channels yet, so the typical user wouldn’t have gotten it yet.

I believe this would have gone out in debian 12.6 next week, and the attacker was actively petitioning fedora maintainers to get it added to fedora 40 & 41

The interesting thing about this situation was how much effort the attacker put in to gain trust just to get to the point where they could do this, and how targeted the vulnerability seems to have been. They tried very hard to reduce the likelihood of being caught by only hitting a limited set of configurations

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