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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 2nd, 2024

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  • I’m a huge proponent of Gentoo Linux as a learning experience. It’s a great way to learn how the components of a system work together and the distro enables an amazing amount of configurability for your system.

    Even following a handbook install in a VM can be a good experience if you’re interested.






  • You don’t have to!

    If a downstream distribution wants your software they will build and package it themselves and maintain that infrastructure.

    You could provide an example rpm spec (etc) to make their lives easier but it’s not on you to provide a binary package that works everywhere; you released the source code so any given user / distro can compile it for themselves.

    Just make sure that your build infrastructure and docs are up to speed, and ideally implement some CI/CD and testing to catch any breaking changes.




  • TL;DR don’t worry (for now) - it only impacts rpm and deb builds and impacted releases only really made it into OpenSuSe tumbleweed - if you’re running bleeding edge maybe you need to worry a little.

    A laymans explanation about what happens is that the malicious package uses an indirect linkage (via systemd) to openssh and overrides a crypto function which either:

    • allows access to the system to a particular key
    • allows remote code execution with a particular key

    Or both!

    I have secondhand info that privately the reverse engineering is more advanced, but nobody wants to lead with bad info.

    As for what you should do? Unless you’re running an rpm or deb based distro and you have version 5.6.0 or 5.6.1 of xz-utils installed, not much. If you are, well, that comes down to your threat model and paranoia level: either upgrade (downgrade) the package to a non-vulnerable version or dust off and nuke the site from orbit; it’s the only way to be sure.