To be fair, we only know of this one. There may well be other open source backdoors floating around with no detection. Was heartbleed really an accident?
True. And the “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” is a neat sounding thing from the past when the amount of code lines was not as much as now. Sometimes it is scary to see how long a vulnerability in the Linux kernel had been there for years, “waiting” to be exploited.
Still far better than a proprietary kernel made by a tech corp, carried hardly changed from release to release, even fewer people maintain, and if they do they might well be adding a backdoor themselves for their government agency friends.
true, opensource can be flawed, but it’s certain less flawed than a closed source alternatives
Exactly.
Yeah he didn’t find the right unmaintained project. There are many many many cs undergrads starting projects that will become unmaintained pretty soon.
I’ve gotten back into tinkering on a little Rust game project, it has about a dozen dependencies on various math and gamedev libraries. When I go to build (just like with npm in my JavaScript projects) cargo needs to download and build just over 200 projects. 3 of them build and run “install scripts” which are just also rust programs. I know this because my anti-virus flagged each of them and I had to allow them through so my little roguelike would build.
Like, what are we even suppose to tell “normal people” about security? “Yeah, don’t download files from people you don’t trust and never run executables from the web. How do I install this programming utility? Blindly run code from over 300 people and hope none of them wanted to sneak something malicious in there.”
I don’t want to go back to the days of hand chisling every routine into bare silicon by hand, but i feel l like there must be a better system we just haven’t devised yet.
Which is why you shouldn’t do that. Dependency nightmare is a real problem many developers face. More to the point they impose it on you as well if you are by any reason forced to use their software. Well established libraries are gateway to this. People are getting out of their way to complicate lives to themselves and massive amount of others just so they could avoid writing a function or two. Biggest absurdity I like to point out to people is the existence of
is-numberNPM package, which does that. It has 2300 dependent projects on it!!! Manifest file for said package is bigger than the source. And the author had the hubris to “release it under MIT”. How can you claim copyright onnum - num === 0?On all the projects I manage I don’t allow new dependencies unless they are absolutely needed and can’t be easily re-implemented. And even then they’d have to be already in the Debian respository since it’s a good and easy way to ensure quick fixes and patching should it be needed. Sometimes alternative to what we wanted to use already is in repo, then we implement using different approach. We only have few Python modules that are not available in repo.
Managing project complexity is a hard thing and dependencies especially have a nasty habit of creeping up. I might be too rigid or old-school or whatever you want to call it, but hey at least we didn’t get our SSH keys stolen by NPM package.
THIS.
I do not get why people don’t learn from Node/NPM: If your language has no exhaustive standard library the community ends up reinventing the wheel and each real world program has hundreds of dependencies (or thousands).
Instead of throwing new features at Rust the maintainers should focus on growing a trusted standard library and improve tooling, but that is less fun I assume.
Can you give some examples of things missing from Rust standard library?
Easily, just look at the standard libraries of Java/Python and Golang! :-P
To get one thing out of the way: Each standard library has dark corners with bad APIs and outdated modules. IMHO it is a tradeoff, and from my experience even a bad standard library works better than everyone reinvents their small module. If you want to compare it to human languages: Having no standard library is like agreeing on the English grammar, but everyone mostly makes up their own words, which makes communication challenging.
My examples of missing items from the Rust standard library (correct me, if I am wrong, not a Rust user for many reasons):
- Cross platform GUI library (see SWING/Tk)
- Enough bits to create a server
- Full set of data structures and algorithms
- Full set of serialization format processing XML/JSON/YAML/CVS/INI files
- HTTP(S) server for production with support for letsencrypt etc.
Things I don’t know about if they are provided by a Rust standard library:
- Go like communication channels
- High level parallelism constructs (like Tokyo etc.)
My point is, to provide good enough defaults in a standard library which everybody knows/are well documented and taught. If someone has special needs, they always can come up with a library. Further, if something in the standard library gets obsolete, it can easily be deprecated.
Python doesn’t have a production web server in its standard library. Neither does Java. Those are external programs or libraries. C# is the only language I know that comes with an official production grade server, and that’s still a separate package (IIS).
Rust has a set of recommended data structures in their standard libraries too: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/index.html
I don’t know what algorithms you are looking for so can’t answer here.
The rest I don’t think are included in Rust. Then again they aren’t included in most languages standard libraries.
Golangs web server is production grade and used in production. (Of course everyone uses some high performance proxy like NGINX for serving static pages, that’s another story.)
Technically you are right that java has no production web server, which I don’t like, OTOH Java has standard APIs WebServers and Spring is the defacto standard for web applications. (I totally would not mind to move Spring into the OpenJDK.)
My point is simple: Instead of having Rust edtion 2020, 2021 etc. and tweaking the syntax ad infinitum, I’d rather have a community which invests in a good/broad standard library and good tooling.
The only platform widely used in production w/o a big standard library is Node.js/JavaScript, mostly for historical reasons and look at the problems that Node.js has for a decade now because of the missing standard library.
I thought they already had decent tooling and standard libraries?
It’s a really wicked problem to be sure. There is work underway in a bunch of places around different approaches to this; take a look at SBoM (software bill-of-materials) and reproducible builds. Doesn’t totally address the trust issue (the malicious xz releases had good gpg signatures from a trusted contributor), but makes it easier to spot binary tampering.
+1
Shameless plug to the OSS Review Toolkit project (https://oss-review-toolkit.org/ort/) which analyze your package manager, build a dependency tree and generates a SBOM for you. It can also check for vulnerabilitiea with the help of VulnerableCode.
It is mainly aimed at OSS Compliance though.
(I am a contributor)
Do you really need to download new versions at every build? I thought it was common practice to use the oldest safe version of a dependency that offers the functionality you want. That way your project can run on less up to date systems.
Most softwares do not include detailed security fixes in the change log for people to check; and many of these security fixes are in dependencies, so it is unlikely to be documented by the software available to the end user.
So most of the time, the safest “oldest safe” version is just the latest version.
So only protects like Debian do security backports?
Edit: why the downvote? Is this not something upstream developers do? Security fixes on older releases?
Backports for supported versions sure,.
That’s why there is an incentive to limit support to latest and maybe one previous release, it saves on the backporting burden.
Okay, but are you still going to audit 200 individual dependencies even once?
That’s what the “oldest safe version” is supposed to address.
Because everything is labeled safe and unsafe, right?
Your snark is tremendously conducive for a conversation. Go touch some grass.
I’m not familiar with rust but at least for java there’s a owasp plugin that tells you if you’re using an unsafe library.
Like, what are we even suppose
supposed
to tell “normal people” about security? “Yeah, don’t download files from people you don’t trust and never run executables from the web. How do I install this programming utility? Blindly run code from over 300 people and hope none of them wanted to sneak something malicious in there.”
You’re starting to come to an interesting realization about the state of ‘modern’ programming and the risks we saw coming 20 years ago.
I don’t want to go back to the days […]
You don’t need to trade convenience for safety, but having worked in OS Security I would recommend it.
Pulling in random stuff you haven’t validated should feel really uncomfortable as a professional.
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everytime this happens i become unexplainably happy.
There’s just something about a community doing it’s fucking job that gets me so normal feeling.
Getting noticed because of a 300ms delay at startup by a person that is not a security researcher or even a programmer after doing all that would be depressing honestly.
I love free software community. This is one of the things free software was created. The community defends its users.
I second this. I love to feel part of a community even tho I could have never found the backdoor, let alone fix it.
opensourceautists win!Opensautists
The problem I have with this meme post is that it gives a false sense of security, when it should not.
Open or closed source, human beings have to be very diligent and truly spend the time reviewing others code, even when their project leads are pressuring them to work faster and cut corners.
This situation was a textbook example of this does not always happen. Granted, duplicity was involved, but still.
100%.
In many ways, distributed open source software gives more social attack surfaces, because the system itself is designed to be distributed where a lot of people each handle a different responsibility. Almost every open source license includes an explicit disclaimer of a warranty, with some language that says something like this:
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
Well, bring together enough dependencies, and you’ll see that certain widely distributed software packages depend on the trust of dozens, if not hundreds, of independent maintainers.
This particular xz vulnerability seems to have affected systemd and sshd, using what was a socially engineered attack on a weak point in the entire dependency chain. And this particular type of social engineering (maintainer burnout, looking for a volunteer to take over) seems to fit more directly into open source culture than closed source/corporate development culture.
In the closed source world, there might be fewer places to probe for a weak link (socially or technically), which makes certain types of attacks more difficult. In other words, it might truly be the case that closed source software is less vulnerable to certain types of attacks, even if detection/audit/mitigation of those types of attacks is harder for closed source.
It’s a tradeoff, not a free lunch. I still generally trust open source stuff more, but let’s not pretend it’s literally better in every way.
It’s a tradeoff, not a free lunch. I still generally trust open source stuff more, but let’s not pretend it’s literally better in every way.
Totally agree.
All the push back I’m getting is from people who seem to be worried about open source somehow losing a positive talking point, when comparing it to close source systems, which is not my intention (the loss of the talking point). (I personally use Fedora/KDE.)
But sticking our heads in the sand doesn’t help things, when issues arise, we should acknowledge them and correct them.
using what was a socially engineered attack on a weak point in the entire dependency chain.
An example of what you may be speaking about, indirectly. We can only hope that maintainers do due diligence, but it is volunteer work.
There are two big problems with the point that you’re trying to make:
-
There are many open source projects being run by organizations with as much (often stronger) governance over commit access as a private corporation would have over its closed source code base. The most widely used projects tend to fall under this category, like Linux, React, Angular, Go, JavaScript, and innumerable others. Governance models for a project are a very reasonable thing to consider when deciding whether to use a dependency for your application or library. There’s a fair argument to be made that the governance model of this xz project should have been flagged sooner, and hopefully this incident will help stir broader awareness for that. But unlike a closed source code base, you can actually know the governance model and commit access model of open source software. When it comes to closed source software you don’t know anything about the company’s hiring practices, background checks, what access they might provide to outsourced agents from other countries who may be compromised, etc.
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You’re assuming that 100% of the source code used in a closed source project was developed by that company and according to the company’s governance model, which you assume is a good one. In reality BSD/MIT licensed (and illegally GPL licensed) open source software is being shoved into closed source code bases all the time. The difference with closed source software is that you have no way of knowing that this is the case. For all you know some intern already shoved a compromised xz into some closed source software that you’re using, and since that intern is gone now it will be years before anyone in the company notices that their software has a well known backdoor sitting in it.
None of what I’m saying is unique to the mechanics of open source. It’s just that the open source ecosystem as it currently exists today has different attack surfaces than a closed source ecosystem.
Governance models for a project are a very reasonable thing to consider when deciding whether to use a dependency for your application or library.
At a certain point, though, that’s outsourced to trust whoever someone else trusts. When I trust a specific distro (because I’m certainly not rolling my own distro), I’m trusting how they maintain their repos, as well as which packages they include by default. Then, each of those packages has dependencies, which in turn have dependencies. The nature of this kind of trust is that we select people one or two levels deep, and assume that they have vetted the dependencies another one or two levels, all the way down. XZ did something malicious with systemd, which opened a vulnerability in sshd, as compiled for certain distros.
You’re assuming that 100% of the source code used in a closed source project was developed by that company and according to the company’s governance model, which you assume is a good one.
Not at all. I’m very aware that some prior hacks by very sophisticated, probably state sponsored attackers have abused the chain of trust in proprietary software dependencies. Stuxnet relied on stolen private keys trusted by Windows for signing hardware drivers. The Solarwinds hack relied on compromising plugins trusted by Microsoft 365.
But my broader point is that there are simply more independent actors in the open source ecosystem. If a vulnerability takes the form of the weakest link, where compromising any one of the many independent links is enough to gain access, that broadly distributed ecosystem is more vulnerable. If a vulnerability requires chaining different things together so that multiple parts of the ecosystem are compromised, then distributing decisionmaking makes the ecosystem more robust. That’s the tradeoff I’m describing, and making things spread too thin introduces the type of vulnerability that I’m describing.
-
Forgot to ask, but I would love to hear your thoughts on what @5C5C5C@programming.dev has commented about this subject: https://lemmy.world/comment/9003210
In the broader context of that thread, I’m inclined to agree with you: The circumstances by which this particular vulnerability was discovered shows that it took a decent amount of luck to catch it, and one can easily imagine a set of circumstances where this vulnerability would’ve slipped by the formal review processes that are applied to updates in these types of packages. And while it would be nice if the billion-dollar-companies that rely on certain packages would provide financial support for the open source projects they use, the question remains on how we should handle it when those corporations don’t. Do we front it ourselves, or just live with the knowledge that our security posture isn’t optimized for safety, because nobody will pay for that improvement?
i feel like the mental gymnastics should end with a rake step
It’s about the complex rationalizations used to create excuses (pretexts).
The original is this:
Alright I won’t argue about that specific version’s point, but this is basically a template for constructing a strawman argument.
Lmao this is the first time I’m seeing this format, I like the content so far.
I feel like that’s really crappy non-vegan mental gymnastics. I think veganism is morally superior, but I really want to show mine off, just because I’m offended by how stupid all these are-the fact I know they’re real makes me more ashamed of eating that yogurt earlier than any amount of chatt slavery or butchery ever will.
Queensbury Rules init.
Init as in 'contraction of "isnt it”’? Or as in ‘initialize’?
Immediately noticed even though the packages have been out for over a month?
Easily could have stolen a ton of information in that month.
Yeah but tbf it was deployed on mostly rolling release and beta releases.
No enterprise on prod is worried because they’re still on RHEL 6 /s
Why the /s? We are migrating our host to RHEL7 since months.
we’ve skipped 7 and are jumping straight to 8. The process has been going on for two years now. 9 was released 2 years ago
Ours goes to 11.
My innocent home lab bum thought 4 years would be enough to assume people got off of an EOLd distro lol
Yeah they got lucky. But shows how susceptible systems are. Really makes you wonder how many systems are infected with similar - this wouldn’t be the first back door that’s live in Linux systems.
On what? Servers using Arch Linux? Debian Unstable? Fedora 40?
Phew, thankfully everyone follows appropriate procedures and doesn’t just roll out beta updates to production in their systems.
Right?
I hope so lol. At that point that is natural selection though.
It is pretty funny, I bet he’s kicking himself right now for it.
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What are you saying? That there are people doing the top version (“I want a backdoor / I ask the corpo to grant me access”) for FOSS but they’re less likely to get caught if they don’t do all the gymnastics?
OP is referring to a backdoor that was found. It apparently modified behaviour in a way that was noticeable to humans, suggesting that it was built by an unskilled adversary.
It’s a safe bet that there are others (in FOSS) that remain undiscovered. We know that skilled adversaries can produce pretty amazing attacks (e.g. stuxnet), so it seems likely that similar vulnerabilities remain in other FOSS packages.
Stuxnet was done by a literal army assembled by state actors with massive funding hoarding zero days. If an attack like that came at you there is very little you can do.
It’s a safe bet that there are others (in FOSS) that remain undiscovered.
I agree, but I don’t think that image (about survivors’ bias) applies to the op meme then, as that would imply that it only seems like open source backdoors are convoluted because we’ve not found the simple/obvious ones
Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not. This can lead to incorrect conclusions because of incomplete data.
In this case, the selection process is discovering human-evident back doors. It fits by my reading.
Eh, autism jokes are not funny. Ableism isn’t funny.
