this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
83 points (95.6% liked)

Explain Like I'm Five

14263 readers
298 users here now

Simplifying Complexity, One Answer at a Time!

Rules

  1. Be respectful and inclusive.
  2. No harassment, hate speech, or trolling.
  3. Engage in constructive discussions.
  4. Share relevant content.
  5. Follow guidelines and moderators' instructions.
  6. Use appropriate language and tone.
  7. Report violations.
  8. Foster a continuous learning environment.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
sabbah@lemmy.world
AradFort@lemmy.world
rikudou@lemmings.world
Don_Dickle@lemmy.world
Rikudou_Sage@lemmy.world
83
ELI5: The Linux xz backdoor situation (pawb.social)
submitted 7 months ago by VinesNFluff@pawb.social to c/explainlikeimfive@lemmy.world
33 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

PLEASE. I keep seeing it in memes. As I understand it the latest version of the xz package (present in rolling release distros like Arch and SUSE Tumbleweed) has "a backdoor", but I have no earthly clue what can be done by malicious folks with access to that backdoor or if I should be afraid or how to check if my distro is compromised or how to prevent damage if it is or (...)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ilmagico@lemmy.world 9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

TL;DR: Simply downgrade to a version before 5.6.0, or follow the official recommendations for your distro. For Arch, for example, simply upgrade your system.

Explanation (from my understanding ): a malicious developer snuck a backdoor into xz, starting with version 5.6.0,and thankfully it was caught before it could do much damage. This seems to only affect Fedora and Debian based distros, or otherwise distros where ssh is patched to link to systemd, which in turn links to xz. Arch doesn't seem to be affected, but they took some preventative action. Again, follow the announcements from your distro, or just downgrade xz.

It is not yet clear what a malicious actor can do with that backdoor, but it seems, in affected systems, it enables remote code execution (if you don't know what that means, just know it's really bad), but last I checked security researchers were still analyzing the code. Things move fast, so maybe by now it is known.