Linux

48090 readers

727 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

[email protected]

1217

XZ backdoor in a nutshell (lemmy.zip)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

162 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

They’re promising to give notice, but it’s just not a good situation.

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.