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Over a period of over two years, an attacker using the name “Jia Tan” worked as a diligent, effective contributor to the xz compression library, eventually being granted commit access and maintainership. Using that access, they installed a very subtle, carefully hidden backdoor into liblzma, a part of xz that also…
Andres Freund published the existence of the xz attack on 2024-03-29 to the public oss-security@openwall mailing list. The day before, he alerted Debian security and the (private) distros@openwall list. In his mail, he says that he dug into this after “observing a few odd symptoms around liblzma (part of the xz…
Supply chain security is a hot topic today, but it is a very old problem. In October 1983, 40 years ago this week, Ken Thompson chose supply chain security as the topic for his Turing award lecture, although the specific term wasn’t used back then. (The field of computer science was still young and small enough that…
Over the weekend, a developer named Marak Squires intentionally sabotaged his popular NPM package colors and his less popular package faker . As I write this, NPM claims 18,971 direct dependents for colors and 2,751 for faker . Open Source Insights counts at least 42,000 more indirect dependents for colors . Many…
My last post described how user-level CPU profilers work, and specifically how Google’s pprof profiler gathers its CPU profiles with the help of the operating system. The specific feature needed from the operating system is the profiling timer provided by setitimer (2) and the SIGPROF signals that it delivers.
I was a remote opening keynote speaker at ACM SCORED 2023 , which we decided meant that I sent a video to play and I was on Discord during the talk for attendees to text directly with question as the video played, and then we did some live but still remote Q&A after the talk.
Last week, Debian announced that in September 2006 they accidentally broke the OpenSSL pseudo-random number generator while trying to silence a Valgrind warning. One effect this had is that the ssh-keygen program installed on recent Debian systems (and Debian-derived systems like Ubuntu) could only generate 32,767…