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Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2024 01:23:28 +0100 (CET)
From: Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@...i.de>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Re: backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to
ssh server compromise
On Saturday 2024-03-30 21:43, Mats Wichmann wrote:
> On 3/30/24 09:32, Jeffrey Walton wrote:
>
>>> Someone asked what would become of xz as a project. I do hope in
>>> light of this event, some people step in to help.
>>
>> Perhaps Lasse should turn over control of the project to an entity
>
> In light of this scenario (at least what I understand about it),
> it's got to be even harder now for an overloaded maintainer to
> accept help of a significant nature.
I think it may not make much of a difference.
In the instance of xz, the usurper convinced maintainers with
contributions over the course of some 2 years to gain reasonable
control of the project, and in essence, users.
If instead, we picture that a maintainer withholds control (either due
to lack of will, or lack of time), an usurper would have to start a fork
and convince *users* directly to trust and favor the replacement, an
undertaking which might have reasonably taken about 2-3 years as well
(judging from the timeframes it took libjpeg-turbo or systemd to get a
footing in distros).
Other software might have completely different "usurp time"
characteristics. That all depends on both how integrated a software
is in the larger ecosystem and how many users there already are that
would care (for either an improvement or when it breaks).
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