The failed attempt to backdoor SSH globally – that got caught by chance

Re:The failed attempt to backdoor SSH globally – that got ca... by inopinatus on Monday April 01, 2024 @05:26AM (#39892208)

The dependency is attributable, in the largest part, to systemd's neoplastic aggrandizement of userland infrastructure and associated plumbing, making this a distinction without much of a difference.

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Re:The failed attempt to backdoor SSH globally – that got ca... by XorNot on Monday April 01, 2024 @05:29AM (#39892236)

"everyone should just reimplement LZMA!"

What could possibly go wrong. I'm sure there's no history of compression tools having serious vulnerabilities due to implementation errors...

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Re:The failed attempt to backdoor SSH globally – that got ca... by inopinatus on Monday April 01, 2024 @05:33AM (#39892261)

This is another furphy, because OpenSSH proper neither requires nor uses xz/lzma. It's made clear in Andres Freund's original report¹ that the libsystemd dependency dragging it along arises from distros patching openssh to support systemd notifications. The sad part is that systemd notifications are just a datagram on a socket, so using libsystemd for this is reminiscent of Joe Armstrong's banana.

[1] https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2024/q1/268

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Re:The failed attempt to backdoor SSH globally – that got ca... by LtWorf on Monday April 01, 2024 @05:42AM (#39892314)

As many have already pointed out, the library can also be linked to sshd via selinux.

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Re:The failed attempt to backdoor SSH globally – that got ca... by inopinatus on Monday April 01, 2024 @05:57AM (#39892388)

I've seen that ambit claim too, but I'm not even sure what distro(s) it is referring to since I'm unable to confirm it on any host where I have ldd casually to hand. Ref however https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2024/q1/356

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Re:The failed attempt to backdoor SSH globally – that got ca... by usr1106 on Monday April 01, 2024 @08:11AM (#39893266)

That packaging error makes liblzma being pulled in at installation (well, it's probably already there if pid 1 requires it). But it will not make the sshd binary use it. So I think the original claim stands: Without patching sshd for the notification it will not use liblzma.

Disclaimer: I did not search for all possible occurrences of dlopen().

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Re:The failed attempt to backdoor SSH globally – that got ca... by himinlomax on Monday April 01, 2024 @10:54AM (#39894765)

https://github.com/proposal-signals/proposal-signals

> libselinux does not link to liblzma. It turns out the confusion was because of an old downstream-only patch in Fedora and a stale dependency in the RPM spec which persisted long-beyond its removal.

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Re:The failed attempt to backdoor SSH globally – that got ca... by xxs on Monday April 01, 2024 @06:46AM (#39892654)

I get the sentiment. zstd is just better, though!

Other than that I did try a manual port (of zstd) to Java but I was not pleased with the results.

The other part is that systemd uses plain unix sockets with the most basic of protocols (that part along with docker forwarder was doable)

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