Sourceware mitigating and preventing the next xz-backdoor

[Michael Matz]

Hello,

On Wed, 3 Apr 2024, Martin Uecker via Gcc wrote:

> > > Seems reasonable, but note that it wouldn't make any difference to
> > > this attack.  The liblzma library was modified to corrupt the sshd
> > > binary, when sshd was linked against liblzma.  The actual attack
> > > occurred via a connection to a corrupt sshd.  If sshd was running as
> > > root, as is normal, the attacker had root access to the machine.  None
> > > of the attacking steps had anything to do with having root access
> > > while building or installing the program.
> 
> There does not seem a single good solution against something like this.
> 
> My take a way is that software needs to become less complex. Do 
> we really still need complex build systems such as autoconf?

Do we really need complex languages like C++ to write our software in?  
SCNR :)  Complexity lies in the eye of the beholder, but to be honest in 
the software that we're dealing with here, the build system or autoconf 
does _not_ come to mind first when thinking about complexity.

(And, FWIW, testing for features isn't "complex".  And have you looked at 
other build systems?  I have, and none of them are less complex, just 
opaque in different ways from make+autotools).


Ciao,
Michael.