this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
1215 points (99.1% liked)
Linux
48220 readers
616 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You're looking at the wrong line. NixOS pulled the compromised source tarball just like nearly every other distro, and the build ends up running the backdoor injection script.
It's just that much like Arch, Gentoo and a lot of other distros, it doesn't meet the gigantic list of preconditions for it to inject the sshd compromising backdoor. But if it went undetected for longer, it would have met the conditions for the "stage3"/"extension mechanism".
Never mind the lines I linked to I just copied the links from search.nixos.org and those always link to the description field's line for some reason. I did link to unstable twice though this is the correct one, as you can see it goes to tukaani.org, not github.com. Correct me if I'm wrong but while you can attach additional stuff (such like pre-built binaries) to github releases the source tarballs will be generated from the repository and a tag, they will match the repository. Maybe you can do some shenanigans with rebase which should be fixed.
For any given tag, GitHub will always have an autogenerated "archive/" link, but the "release/" link is a set of maintainer-uploaded blobs. In this situation, those are the compromised ones. Any distro pulling from an "archive/" link would be unaffected, but I don't know of any doing that.
The problem with the "archive/" links is that GitHub reserves the right to change them. They're promising to give notice, but it's just not a good situation. The "release/" links are only going to change if the maintainer tries something funny, so the distro's usual mechanisms to check the hashes normally suffice.
NixOS 23.11 is indeed not affected.
cache.nixos.org keeps all sources so once hydra has ingested something it's not going away unless nixos maintainers want it to. The policy for decades was simply "keep all derivations" but in the interest of space savings it has recently been decided to do a gc run, meaning that 22 year old derivations will still available but you're going to have to build them from the cached source, the pre-built artifacts will be gone.