A backdoor in xz

Posted Mar 30, 2024 13:58 UTC (Sat) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935)
In reply to: A backdoor in xz by bluca
Parent article: A backdoor in xz

I wonder however if simple and common functionality like notification and file descriptor retrieval belongs in the same public-facing library as reading the journal and the coredumps. Perhaps they should be moved out of libsystemd and into a two-file (.h and .c) copylib?

A backdoor in xz

Posted Mar 31, 2024 12:17 UTC (Sun) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link] (4 responses)

It used to be, but it was merged, because it's just an unnecessary pain for developers to have to know multiple extremely similar libraries, and have to reason about which one to use and link to, etc etc.

The manager <-> service protocol is trivial, so the solution is to just reimplement it if that's all you need. I'll check whether we have some MIT-0 copy-paste ready examples, and if not add it to the documentation.

A backdoor in xz

Posted Apr 1, 2024 5:31 UTC (Mon) by mchapman (subscriber, #66589) [Link] (3 responses)

systemd used to provide a reference implementation (+ header). Perhaps something like this could be brought back?

A backdoor in xz

Posted Apr 1, 2024 11:02 UTC (Mon) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link] (2 responses)

There will be a MIT-0 (so it can be copy/pasted with impunity) self-contained example in the documentation where the protocol is defined

A backdoor in xz

Posted Apr 2, 2024 17:16 UTC (Tue) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link]

This is now published: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/devel/sd...

A backdoor in xz

Posted Apr 2, 2024 20:40 UTC (Tue) by himi (subscriber, #340) [Link]

A similar reference implementation in a few other common languages would be nice, too - with systemd it's gotten so easy to write system daemons in things like python that a copyable reference implementation would be quite helpful. It's simple enough that no one's bothered writing a library, but fiddly enough to do properly that rolling your own isn't always the best option.