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Re:The xz attack shell script by echoangle on Tuesday April 02, 2024 @06:15PM (#39911437)
I’m not a security professional either, but that doesn’t sound very plausible to me. If you assume a maintainer who checks every commit added to the codebase, he’s hopefully blocking you the second he sees an eval call in your build script. And even a code audit should find weird stuff like that, if the code is pythonic and simple to read. And if it’s not, it should not be trusted and should be treated as malicious.
Re:The xz attack shell script by sunshowers on Tuesday April 02, 2024 @06:36PM (#39911585)
Well, the threat model here is that a maintainer themselves is the saboteur.
Re:The xz attack shell script by cjbprime on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @12:34AM (#39913619)
That was true for this project, which was almost orphaned to begin with. We'll run out of nearly-unmaintained critical infrastructure projects sometime. Larger projects with healthier maintenance situations are also at risk, and it's worth reasoning about how a group of honest developers could discover the actions of one malicious developer (with perhaps a malicious reviewer involved too).