cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • Funny that blog calls it a “failed attempt at a backdoor” while neglecting to mention that the grsec post (which it does link to and acknowledges is the source of the story) had been updated months prior to explicitly refute that characterization:

    5/22/2020 Update: This kind of update should not have been necessary, but due to irresponsible journalists and the nature of social media, it is important to make some things perfectly clear:

    Nowhere did we claim this was anything more than a trivially exploitable vulnerability. It is not a backdoor or an attempted backdoor, the term does not appear elsewhere in this blog at all; any suggestion of the sort was fabricated by irresponsible journalists who did not contact us and do not speak for us.

    There is no chance this code would have passed review and be merged. No one can push or force code upstream.

    This code is not characteristic of the quality of other code contributed upstream by Huawei. Contrary to baseless assertions from some journalists, this is not Huawei’s first attempt at contributing to the kernel, in fact they’ve been a frequent contributor for some time.











  • This video is full of jarring edits which initially made me wonder if someone had cut out words or phrases to create an abbreviated version. But, then I realized there are way too many of them to have been done manually. I checked the full original video and from the few edits i manually checked it seems like it is just inconsequential pauses etc that were removed: for instance, when Linus says “the other side of that picture” in the original there is an extra “p” sound which is removed here.

    Yet another irritating and unnecessary application of neural networks, I guess.














  • xzbot from Anthony Weems enables to patch the corrupted liblzma to change the private key used to compare it to the signed ssh certificate, so adding this to your instructions might enable me to demonstrate sshing into the VM :)

    Fun :)

    Btw, instead of installing individual vulnerable debs as those kali instructions I linked to earlier suggest, you could also point debootstrap at the snapshot service so that you get a complete system with everything as it would’ve been in late March and then run that in a VM… or in a container. You can find various instructions for creating containers and VMs using debootstrap (eg, this one which tells you how to run a container with systemd-nspawn; but you could also do it with podman or docker or lxc). When the instructions tell you to run debootstrap, you just want to specify a snapshot URL like https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20240325T212344Z/ in place of the usual Debian repository url (typically https://deb.debian.org/debian/).


  • A daily ISO of Debian testing or Ubuntu 24.04 (noble) beta from prior to the first week of April would be easiest, but those aren’t archived anywhere that I know of. It didn’t make it in to any stable releases of any Debian-based distros.

    But even when you have a vulnerable system running sshd in a vulnerable configuration, you can’t fully demo the backdoor because it requires the attacker to authenticate with their private key (which has not been revealed).

    But, if you just want to run it and observe the sshd slowness that caused the backdoor to be discovered, here are instructions for installing the vulnerable liblzma deb from snapshot.debian.org.