It's also very possible that the account was compromised and taken over. A two years long con with real useful work is a lot of patience and effort vs. just stealing a weakly protected account. I wonder if MFA shouldn't be a requirement for accounts that contribute to important OSS projects.

>A two years long con with real useful work is a lot of patience and effort vs. just stealing a weakly protected account.

The long-con theory seems a bit more plausible at the moment

https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz/pull/10667

If you really step back and think about it, this type of behavior is perfectly aligned with any number of well resourced criminal groups and state actors. Two years of contributing in less visible software with the goal of gaining trust and then slowly pushing your broken fix in.

To me that's way more plausible than losing control of your account and the person who compromised it then having someone over a long time insert the backdoor that took a long time to develop and then obfuscate it.

Likely someone at GH is talking to some government agencies right now about the behavior of the private repos of that user and their associated users.

This would be the smarter attack vector, but I've noticed over time that these people are just assholes. They aren't patient. They are in for the smash/grab.

I would not be surprised if there was a group using this approach, but I doubt most of them are/would. If they were that dedicated, they'd just have a fucking job, instead of being dicks on the internet for a living.

For some groups they certainly are.

However at this point: every developed nation has a professional offensive security group that have varying degrees of potency. All are more resourced than 99.9% of organizations defending and enjoy legal autonomy in their country and allied countries for their work.

If you're getting salaried comfortably, and you have near infinite resources, a two year timeline is trivial. As an American, I always like to point to things we know our own services have done first[0].

Each actor group have their own motivations and tactics[1]. As someone who spent a lot of time dealing with a few state actors, you learn your adversaries tricks of the trade and they are patient for the long-con because they can afford to be.

[0] - https://www.npr.org/2020/03/05/812499752/uncovering-the-cias... [1] - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/def...

I think you are confusing non-state e.g. ransomware groups, which are usually not part of a government (although some exceptions like North Korea likely exist) with state-sponsored hackers who are often directly working under military command. Soldiers are not "dicks on the internet".

As someone who has been in a fair few discord chats with soldiers, I'd beg to differ...

>As someone who has been in a fair few discord chats with soldiers, I'd beg to differ...

As someone that's spent a lot of time in darker places, I would agree.

This is not that costly. Growing bonsai trees also takes a lot of patience, decades, but you don't have to grow only one at a time, the pros are growing them in large numbers, with minimal work on each individual trees once in a while.

There is a survivorship bias problem there; what if the stupid criminals are the only ones which you notice?

But what if being a dick on the internet is the job they do for a living?

It might not even be a long time. He might have just been approached exactly because of his history to insert the back door. And offered either money, or blackmailed or threatened

Oh man. The was a scenario that didn't cross my mind. I was too narrowly focused on the technical aspects rather than the social aspects of security. Great point.

What if this contributor was a member of a state actor/persistent threat group and, like some totally legit software dev houses, they encourage their people to contribute to OSS projects for the whole personal pursuit/enjoyment/fulfillment angle?

With the added bonus that sometimes they get to pull off a longcon like this.

This is most likely not his first backdoor, but the first which was detected.

So most likely he didn't wait two years to benefit.

I am thinking more in so-called rubberhose cryptoanalysis.

https://xkcd.com/538/

> It's also very possible that the account was compromised and taken over

Or they WERE legit and simply went rogue, perhaps due to external factors.

2 years of one engineer's time is very cheap, compared to e.g. the NSA's CryptoAG scam. I'd say most likely a Chinese intelligence plant, kindly offering to relieve the burden of the original author of xz.

I got the same idea. On XZ dev mailing list there were a few discussions about "is there a maintainer?" 2-3 years ago. It's not hard to find these types discussions and then dedicate a few years of effort to start "helping out" and eventually be the one signing releases for the project. That's peanuts for a state actor.

This right here. This is exactly what I would be doing - find small broke maintainers offer them a few hundred grand - with a target in mind.

That was a review of someone else's work? https://github.com/tukaani-project/xz/pull/86

Since that repo is disabled: here is a mirror of the discussion [1]

[1] https://archive.is/tksCR

Yeah I saw that - I wouldn't bet on them being in the US but who knows. Maybe they just really love CRC32 ;) And introducing backdoors (if it that was them not an account takeover).

Those tarballs are PGP signed, too..

The full name "Jia Cheong Tan" doesn't sound like Mainland China. The name and actions could be intentionally misleading though.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39867737

Names can be faked, and even real names are not a great indicator.

Unless you have some very specific cultural knowledge you could not make even vaguely useful deductions about my location, nationality, culture, ethnicity etc. from my name. I get a lot of wrong guesses though!

We're way too global now for this to be more than a tiny extra signal. People move around, families preserve names.

Also nobody checked that person's id, so "Jia" is only slightly more meaningful than "ghrssbitrvii".

Since his only appearance outside of github and git repos is on some Taiwanese blogs, can we please change all occurances of China to Taiwan please?

And some others hints at Eastern Europe, comparing the timezones. Taiwan ist still the strongest hint though.