Zack's Kernel News

Article from Issue 284/2024

Author(s): Zack Brown

Zack Brown reports on developer trust.

Developer Trust

In recent days, the infamous "XZ backdoor" has the entire open source world reconsidering its development practices. Essentially, a bad actor joined an open source project, submitted some good patches to gain the trust of the developers, and eventually submitted some cleverly hidden security holes that were actually accepted into the project. It was only when a regular user noticed some odd timing behaviors in the tool and decided to track down the issue that the whole thing came to light.

The open source project was not the Linux kernel, but the tool came very close to being included in many Linux distributions. From there of course, it would have been inside the foundational infrastructure of the entire Internet and almost every corporate network within the known universe.

It's absolutely not the first time this has been attempted, and, of course, there could be any number of similar backdoors that have not yet been discovered. The whole experience has been a wake-up call for the open source world to re-examine their code review practices. For example, one reason the XZ backdoor was able to make it into the project was because the maintainer was overworked and burnt out. So the issue is about more than simply expecting everyone to work harder. We'll be seeing the true effects of this wake-up call for years to come.

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