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I wonder why it was useful to prevent Landlock from being enabled in xz. Perhaps a later stage was to inject malicious content into xz archives? But then why no
by trelane 3y ago
I wonder why it was useful to prevent Landlock from being enabled in xz. Perhaps a later stage was to inject malicious content into xz archives? But then why not just inject malicious activity in xz itself?
- ColonelPhantom 3y agoBecause a deliberate vulnerability is much easier to hide than actual malicious content. One could probably sneak a buffer overflow or use-after-free into a C project they maintain without being noticed. Actually shipping a trojan is much harder, as observed with the xz-to-sshd backdoor.
- trelane 3y agoAh, so the next stage would have been to add a "bug" in xz that would trigger during the supposedly sandboxed execution, when presented with certain input files. Clever.
- puetzk 3y agoWell, is also quite possible that adding such a bug was the previous stage. Or even just having found one that you didn't report/fix...
- A1kmm 3y agoUnless there are more subtle backdoors that target xz itself beyond the targeting of ssh. Clearly the aim was to be subtle.