> From the article: "Initially starting sshd outside of systemd did not show the slowdown, despite the backdoor briefly getting invoked." If I understand correc

> From the article: "Initially starting sshd outside of systemd did not show the slowdown, despite the backdoor briefly getting invoked." If I understand correctly the whole section, the behavior of OpenSSH may have differed when launched from systemd, but the backdoor was there in both cases. It looks like the backdoor "deactivates" itself when it detects being started interactively, as a security researcher might. I was eventually able to circumvent that, but unless you do so, it'll not be active when started interactively. However, the backdoor would also be active if you started it with an shell script (as the traditional sys-v rc scripts did) outside the context of an interactive shell, as TERM wouldn't be set either in that context. > Maybe some distributions that don't use systemd strip the libxz code from the upstream OpenSSH release, but I wouldn't bet on it if a fix is available. There's no xz code in openssh.