A backdoor in xz [LWN.net]

A backdoor in xz

Posted Mar 31, 2024 1:25 UTC (Sun) by DimeCadmium (subscriber, #157243)
In reply to: A backdoor in xz by mb
Parent article: A backdoor in xz

> Yep, and it was broken all the time because everybody did it differently and slightly wrong, until systemd came along.

Ah, okay. And how exactly do you believe that one methods of notifications is any more reliable at this than any other? They all rely on the software developer picking a good time to say "started".

> But let's not distract from the discussion: systemd ist *not* why this backdoor was possible

It absolutely is.

> It could have been any other library

But it wasn't. "Don't worry about our vulnerabilities, other people have vulnerabilities too!" "Don't worry about our bad design, other people have bad design too!"

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A backdoor in xz

Posted Mar 31, 2024 9:22 UTC (Sun) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

> They all rely on the software developer picking a good time to say "started".

They all rely on picking a good time that happens to *work*.

There are plenty of situations where, once you're *really* started, it's no longer possible to signal "OK I'm alive now" by double-forking.

Writing a PID file has its own class of race conditions, the handling of which I can guarantee most users of that method get fatally wrong.

And so on.

> "Don't worry about our vulnerabilities, other people have vulnerabilities too!" "Don't worry about our bad design, other people have bad design too!"

Don't blame the messenger. If linking to a library you don't strictly need *in your particular situation* is a "vulnerability" or "bad design" I can guarantee that 90+% of programs out there suffer from it.