Re: Sourceware mitigating and preventing the next xz-backdoor

Jeffrey Walton via Gdb
2024-04-02T22:52:03Z

On Tue, Apr 2, 2024 at 6:09 PM Guinevere Larsen via Gdb
<gdb@sourceware.org> wrote:
> [...]
> What likely happened for the maintainer who acted in bad faith was that
> they entered the project with bad faith intent from the start - seeing
> as they were only involved with the project for 2 years, and there was
> much social pressure from fake email accounts for the single maintainer
> of XZ to accept help.

The infiltration appears to have started offline, earlier than June
2022. See <https://www.mail-archive.com/xz-devel@tukaani.org/msg00571.html>.

> While we would obviously like to have more area maintainers and possibly
> global maintainers to help spread the load, I don't think any of the
> projects listed here are all that susceptible to the same type of social
> engineering. For one, getting the same type of blanket approval would be
> a much more involved process because we already have a reasonable amount
> of people with those privileges, no one is dealing with burnout and
> sassy customers saying we aren't doing enough.
>
> Beyond that, we (GDB) are already experimenting with approved-by, and I
> think glibc was doing the same. That guarantees at least a second set of
> eyes that analyzed and agreed with the patch, I don't think signed-off
> would add more than that tag (even if security was not the reason why we
> implemented them).

Jeff