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this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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Why would they do this?
Also, if you wanted to do this yourself, it is technically possible. Go build LFS and read every single LOC.
The kernel alone has more than 30,000,000 LOC. Alone reading would take forever and a day for a single person, let alone understand it.
That’s barely the tip of the iceberg, too. Currently, popular projects sit at:
31M for KDE
25M for GNOME
41M for Chromium
42M for Mozilla Firefox
17M for LLVM
15M for GCC
(Note that this metric includes comments and blank lines, to which Linux would count at 46M lines. Counts with blank lines and comments removed are also in those links)
Even if a package was completely vetted, line-by-line, before it made it into a repo, would the maintainer need to get every update, too? Every PR? Imagine the maintenance burden. This code QA and maintainer burden discussion was the crux of one of the most popular discussions on the Fedora devel list.
Finally, presumably if anyone added some malicious code in a their program, it would be sneaky and not obvious from quickly reading the code.
I'd expect them to properly comment it with "#-------Begin malicious shit--------".
COMMENT YOUR CODE, PEOPLE!
The exploit should be written in a way that it is obvious and doesn't need commenting!
Oh, in that case we don't need to read either - just run a simple grep!
Those malicious coders are too sly for that. Some write "Sh1t" to throw grep off, others even do a "B3g1n"... They are always one step ahead!
Good point. I'd try to grep for something like
[Bb3][Ee3]g[Ii1][nη]\w+<and so on>but I just know I'll miss somethingWell yeah, the recent xz vulnerability was not present in the source code at all. Any amount of code reading would not have caught that one.
Wasn't the problem that ~~it~~ the backdoor was not present in the source code on GitHub, but was in the source tarball? So as long as one reads the code that one actually builds from should be fine.
A line of code that enables the backdoor was out present in the tarball. The actual code was obfuscated within an archive used for the unit testing.
OK. So simply reading what was readable wouldn't have helped. Thanks.
It is bonkers that a fucking Web Browser has more LOC than a Desktop Environment
It's even more bonkers than it sounds. If you look at the code locations for that KDE count, you'll see it also includes just about every KDE project. That's not just Plasma, that's hundreds of projects, including some really big ones like Krita, Kdenlive, Calligra, LabPlot, Kontact, Digikam and Plasma Mobile. Hell, it even includes KHTML/KJS, KDE's defunct web engine as well as the ancestor of WebKit and Blink. It even includes AngelFish and Falkon, KDE's current web browser frontends.
Same deal with GNOME. It includes just about everything on GNOME's GitLab, even things that are merely hosted there without strictly being GNOME projects, like GIMP and GTK.
And yet still they are both that far behind Chromium and Firefox. Modern web browsers are ludicrous.
Not really the browser does everything these days.