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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).

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How the xz backdoor highlights a major flaw in Nix (shadeyg56.vercel.app)

submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The main issue is the handling of security updates within the Nixpkgs ecosystem, which relies on Nix's CI system, Hydra, to test and build packages. Due to the extensive number of packages in the Nixpkgs repository, the process can be slow, causing delays in the release of updates. As an example, the updated xz 5.4.6 package took nearly 5 days to become available in the unstable branch!

Fundamentally, there needs to be a change in how security fixes are handled in Hydra. As stated in the article, Nix was lucky to be unaffected, but multiple days to push out a security patch of this severity is concerning, even if there was no reason for concern.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Anyway the xz backdoor was enabled only in rpm and deb packages.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

AFAIK it was enabled in anything that used the official source tarball. The exploit binaries were added during the tarball build process.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Nope. There were checks of build environment.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Then why did all distros issue a fix for the package?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Because nobody can be sure there are no other backdoors. And, I guess, they wanted to stop distribution of affected source code.