xz VS homebrew-core

Very funny. This one:

https://github.com/tukaani-project/xz/commits?author=thesame...

> The payload of the 'hack' contains fairly easy ways for the xz hackers to update the payload. They actually used it to remove a real issue where their hackery causes issues with valgrind that might lead to discovering it, and they also used it to release 5.6.1 which rewrites significant chunks;

The valgrind fix in 5.6.1 overwrites the same test files used in 5.6.0 instead of using the injection code's extension hooks. This is done with what should have been a highly suspicious commit: https://github.com/tukaani-project/xz/commit/6e636819e8f0703... - this replaces "random" test files with other "random" test files. The state reson is questionable to begin but not including the seed used when the the purpoted reason was to be able to re-create the files in the future is highly suspicous. This should have raised red flags bug no one was watching. I'd say this is another part of the operation that was much more sloppy than it needed to be.

In https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/revision/e446ab7...

You're right, but maybe because there's nothing to see : https://github.com/tukaani-project/xz

$ brew info eza ==> eza: stable 0.18.13 (bottled) Modern, maintained replacement for ls https://github.com/eza-community/eza Not installed From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/HEAD/Formula/e/eza.rb License: MIT ==> Dependencies Build: pandoc ✘, pkg-config ✔, rust ✘ Required: libgit2 ✘ ==> Analytics install: 12,792 (30 days), 38,295 (90 days), 68,375 (365 days) install-on-request: 12,790 (30 days), 38,293 (90 days), 68,375 (365 days) build-error: 0 (30 days)

Is disabling the compromised repo the typical GitHub policy? My concern is there are monorepos used by package managers, like brew, that are a collection of thousands of projects [1]. These monorepos seem like a prime target for attack and if GitHub disables one because a malicious commit was merged then you've taken down an entire ecosystem.

[1] https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core

> Correct. Though we do not appear to be affected, this revert was done out of an abundance of caution.

[1] https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/167512

> right, but now you know even less about your setup when you some roadblock

This is the same with a binary though. And with homebrew, you can't follow patches or flags used or if they change.

- https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/c964ad7fa53ad...

definitely be careful about using fortune in a corporate environment or public space if you don't know what dat files you are using or you might just get an extremely unwelcome surprise.

I was practicing a presentation and used to use "fortune" all the time. I forget exactly what it output but I remember being absolutely mortified about what could have happened if that had popped up during an internal company tech talk.

Kudos to brew for keeping unsuspecting people safe

https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/commit/3fb3c4c3e55...

I'm sorry to be asking this as I find it a bit silly, but it's blocking my PR [3], so could a few of you star the project on Github [1] to get my PR to run?

[1] https://github.com/laktak/chkbit-py

[2] https://brew.sh

[3] https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/160018