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How the xz backdoor highlights a major flaw in Nix
(shadeyg56.vercel.app)
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this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
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I don't even think unstable was suseptical to it. I don't think Nix ties ssh to systemd. Debian and redhat do.
It was not vulnerable to this particular attack because the attack didn't specifically target Nixpkgs. It could have very well done so if they had wanted to.
Anyway the xz backdoor was enabled only in rpm and deb packages.
AFAIK it was enabled in anything that used the official source tarball. The exploit binaries were added during the tarball build process.
Nope. There were checks of build environment.
Then why did all distros issue a fix for the package?
Because nobody can be sure there are no other backdoors. And, I guess, they wanted to stop distribution of affected source code.
Shouldn't the lesson here be "don't introduce more complexity and dependencies to critical software"?
But then again that's systemd in a nutshell...