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The use of trie structure to compare strings without hardcoding raw, searchable string values is very inspired. But yes, some black hat had a really really bad
by jerjerjer 2y ago
The use of trie structure to compare strings without hardcoding raw, searchable string values is very inspired.
But yes, some black hat had a really really bad day: being so close to owning any ssh-enabled recently-updated box and when they can finally see a finish line it is just poof... gone in a day. It was two years of effort from at least one guy and more likely a team.
- jumelles 2y agoHonestly? Good. Anyone doing this sort of work willingly deserves worse.
- optimalsolver 2y agoThat they were harassing and manipulating a lone, unthanked maintainer who had already told them he was dealing with mental issues makes them evil, IMO. The honorable thing for "Jia" to do after this epic failure is seppuku, or whatever his or her local equivalent is.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y agoNobody sees themselves as the bad guy, and that’s not the same as “some people are just fundamentally selfish”. There are definitely loads of people that’d feel like the end justifies the means. There are plenty of people for whom a workday involves doing far worse things for the world than cyberbullying one person, and will look you in the eye and justify it. Plenty of that stuff is socially acceptable in many many mainstream circles. “Being mean to a maintainer” is just one that this community is especially sensitive to, because it involves a highly personified victim that they can relate to.
- optimalsolver 2y agoThese maintainers add vast amounts of value to the modern world, though most of the people that benefit indirectly from their work can't really conceive of what it is they do. People like "Jia" are pure parasites. It's one of the best cases of "why we can't have nice things" I've ever seen.
- qweqwe14 2y agoYeah, they add vast amounts of "value", including (accidentally) reinforcing the status-quo. It would definitely be interesting to see what would happen if the attack wasn't noticed, but instead people focus their interest on attacking Jia Tan because "wow, that guy is one hell of an asshole, it sure is a great thing that he failed!". Whether or not this attack was the rare one that failed out of many similar ones is largely irrelevant to people. Quick, discuss this one particular case where we noticed it, news flash and all. > People like "Jia" are pure parasites They are "parasites" because they don't do what they are "supposed to"? That's pretty crazy. I guess every person that's doing what matches their interests is somehow a bad person/parasite/etc. Or is that only if what they do is forbidden by some rule book? Do you see what I'm getting at here? "pls sir dont create linux backdoar"
- optimalsolver 2y ago>I guess every person that's doing what matches their interests is somehow a bad person/parasite/etc If they inflict harm on their fellow humans in order to do so, then literally yes. There's a reason why a society will collapse if you have too many of this type of person.
- qweqwe14 2y agoHFT is also harmful, and so are the majority of startups that don't do anything actually useful and just take VC money. Those are just a few examples off the top of my head. What I'm saying is that there are a lot more technically legal ways to profit that harm society, some of them more nefarious than what Jia Tan did. Doing things that are bad for the society in a fucked up society seems justifiable. It doesn't necessarily make you a bad person. People just have a more averse reaction to things that are obviously bad, even if in practice there are way worse things that initially seem innocuous and are actually legal to do. That's just the textbook example of hypocrisy.
- lenerdenator 2y agoI think it goes beyond just this particular attempt. I bet they were looking for other targets, targets that are widely-used but maintained by resource-deficient projects. They wanted to do maximum damage with the fewest possible supply chain attacks. The fact that many projects are now searching deep and wide through their commit histories, looking at just who they're taking code from, beginning to develop frameworks for attack mitigation and remediation... an entire type of previously very-promising attack is completely burned. This has been a massive defeat. And it happened all by chance.
- fauigerzigerk 2y ago>an entire type of previously very-promising attack is completely burned. I fear it's not just the attack that is burned. If new contributors have to be distrusted and/or go through some sort of vetting that isn't based on the merit of their contributions, that is a terrible blow to the entire open source movement. The threshold for young coders without a great deal of history and without a network of contacts to become contributors to important open source projects has just gone up massively.
- Brian_K_White 2y agoNah. Hardly going to change anything for the worse, only for the better. The bar is still trivial. The worst part is that it will be difficult to be anonymous. There are a lot of valid, even life & death reasons for anonymity, and that will now be much harder. So the loss is all the contributors who don't dare let their government or employer see them helping the wrong projects, or in some cases don't want to disclose that they are any good at coding or particularly interested in security etc.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago“GitHub Verified”.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
- issafram 2y agoIt was most likely done by a government. Not just one hacker.
- gizmo686 2y agoGovernments are made up of people. There is likely at least 1 real person (if not more) for whom this attack has been the entirety of their professional life for years.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Brian_K_White 2y agoIf so, then they were paid for those hours and are perfectly whole right now. Maybe their career takes a dent but I do not weep for whoever this was no matter which government they worked for, unless it was so bad they were actually a slave and forced to do this against their will. The government who paid them just lost the investment, but who cares about them? It's only a good thing if this does not get a reputation for being a good invesment. If it was a criminal, then the same as the government they lost the investment but again that's only a good thing.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y agoAre you being argumentative for the sake of it? The statement was that someone had a really bad day. The implication that people are driven by money and nothing else, or even that they have no right to feel like they had a bad day if they were paid, is absurd. Nobody is saying that you should be sympathetic. It’s just an interesting comment: An interesting thing to think about. A worthwhile contribution to the conversation. This was someone’s very bad ending to a very long project.
- Brian_K_White 2y agoOk, true. It was a bad day.
- KeplerBoy 2y agoHow much effort was it really? Yes, they worked on it over 2 years, but I guess it wasn't more effort than a few hours every other week (apart from engineering the actual exploit). After all putting in a full time effort as an unpaid contributor would be suspicious in itself. Assuming they work 40 hours a week and are doing this in a team (presumably every major player has such a team or is scrambling to get one now), one must expect many potentially infiltrated projects out there.
- NamTaf 2y ago“Apart from engineering” is doing some seriously heavy lifting here. Writing the actual code is likely just an afterthought by comparison. The engineering - identification of a target weakness, the design of the exploit chain, etc. - is overwhelmingly going to have been the lion’s share of the effort.
- wjholden 2y agoI agree, I had never heard of using a trie as a means of hiding strings. I'm not familiar with any programming language that provides tries in a standardized way. They're not so hard to code, so I wonder if this will become a trend in future malware.
- Terr_ 2y ago> The use of trie structure to compare strings without hardcoding raw, searchable string values is very inspired. Aside, this is one of my grumpy-old-dude opinions when it comes to regular non-malicious code: Source "greppability" is a virtue, one that must be balanced against "don't repeat yourself" and "compile time checking", etc. Some examples off the top of my head: 1. One import/alias per line, no wildcards. 2. If you have to concatenate a literal string across multiple lines, try to ensure the break isn't inside an interesting substring someone would search for. 3. If you write a compile-time constant like foo=4*6*9, the comments around it should also contain the result. Sure, someone might screw up and forget to keep the comment in-sync, but it can also be invaluable when someone else is tearing their hair out trying to find out why the production logs are saying nothing but "Illegal frump: 216". Don't get me wrong, I love a good IDE, and many will offer "Find Usages" or "Find Literal"... but it doesn't always work all the time, for all languages in the project at once, for everyone on a team who might use other tools, or during a PR review through a web-browser, etc.
- ncruces 2y agoIf you have to concatenate a literal string across multiple lines, try to ensure the break isn't inside an interesting substring someone would search for. This is called semantic line breaks and is also important to get (admittedly more naive) diffs sensible. https://sembr.org/ https://sembr.org/
- btown 2y agoAlong the lines of source greppability, at some point someone will try to replace successive a.foo_x, a.foo_y, and a.foo_z accesses with a loop over foo_{suffix}, thus breaking any attempt to grep for foo_y. That someone may be me! This should almost always be struck down in code review wherever possible. Being a bit more DRY isn’t worth it!
- kubanczyk 2y ago4. Avoid complex regexes. E.g. prefer '>>>>>' over '>{5}'
- Terr_ 2y ago
- jlmorton 2y ago> It was two years of effort from at least one guy and more likely a team. You think these guys have standups?