tukaani-project
Pack
tukaani-project | Pack | |
---|---|---|
5 | 1 | |
- | 232 | |
- | 9.9% | |
- | 6.0 | |
- | about 2 months ago | |
Pascal | ||
- | Apache License 2.0 |
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Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
tukaani-project
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Backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to SSH server compromise
Thank you. If you wouldn't have explained the background, I totally would've thought that this is just an innocent typo.
(I still think it's like... 60% a typo? don't know)
Anyhow, other people called the CCing of JiaT75 by Lasse suspicious:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39867593
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240320183846.19475-2-lasse.co...
Someone pointed out the "mental health issues" and "some other things"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39868881
https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00567.h...
Lasse is of course a Nordic name, and the whole project has a finnish name and hosting
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39866902
If I wanted to go rogue and insert a backdoor in a project of mine, I'd probably create a new sockpuppet account and hand over management of the project to them. The above is worringly compatible with this hypothesis.
OTOH, JiaT75 did not reuse the existing hosting provider, but rather switched the site to github.io and uploaded there old tarballs:
https://github.com/tukaani-project/tukaani-project.github.io...
If JiaT75 is an old-timer in the project, wouldn't they have kept using the same hosting infra?
There are also some other grim possibilities: someone forced Lasse to hand over the project (violence or blackmailing? as farfetched as that sounds)... or maybe stole Lasse devices (and identity?) and now Lasse is incapacitated?
Or maybe it's just some other fellow scandinavian who pretends to be chinese and got Lasse's trust.
Is the same person sockpuppeting Hans Jansen? It's amusing (but unsurprising) that they are using both german-sounding and chinese-sounding identities.
That said, I don't think it's unreasonable to think that Lasse genuinely trusted JiaT75, genuinely believed that the ifunc stuff was reasonable (it probably isn't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39869538 ) and handed over the project to them.
And at the end of the day, the only thing linking JiaT75 is a swedish/finnish racist joke which could well be a typo. People already checked the timezone of the commits, but I wonder if anyone has already checked the time-of-day of those commits... does it actually match the working hours that a person genuinely living (and sleeping) in China would follow?
Pack
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Backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to SSH server compromise
The `pack`[0] compression utility that reached the HN front page the other day[1] is setting off my alarm bells right now. (It was at the time too, but now doubly so)
It's written in Pascal, and the only (semi-)documented way to build it yourself is to use a graphical IDE, and pull in pre-compiled library binaries (stored in the git repo of a dependency which afaict Pack is the only dependent of - appears to be maintained by the same pseudonymous author but from a different account).
I've opened an issue[2] outlining my concerns. I'm certainly not accusing them of having backdoored binaries, but if I was setting up a project to be deliberately backdoorable, it'd look a lot like this.
[0] https://pack.ac/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39793805
[2] https://github.com/PackOrganization/Pack/issues/10
What are some alternatives?
systemd - The systemd System and Service Manager
rust1 - rust1
xz - XZ Utils [GET https://api.github.com/repos/tukaani-project/xz: 403 - Repository access blocked]
stencil-golang - Template repository for Golang applications
homebrew-core - 🍻 Default formulae for the missing package manager for macOS (or Linux)
wasmtime - A fast and secure runtime for WebAssembly
openconnect
xz - xz compression in Go