I thought Arch was the only rolling distro that doesn’t have the backdoor. Its sshd is not linked with liblzma, and even if it were, they compile xz directly from git so they wouldn’t have gotten the backdoor anyway.
Yes, this sshd attack vector isn’t possible. However, they haven’t decomposed the exploit and we don’t know the extent of the attack. The reporter of the issue just scratched the surface. If you are using Arch, you should run pacman right now to downgrade.
They actually have an upgrade fix for it, at least for the known parts of it. Doing a standard system upgrade will replace the xz package with one with the known backdoor removed.
The extent of the exploit is still being analyzed so I would update and keep your eye on the news. If you don’t need your computer you could always power down.
I thought Arch was the only rolling distro that doesn’t have the backdoor. Its sshd is not linked with liblzma, and even if it were, they compile xz directly from git so they wouldn’t have gotten the backdoor anyway.
TBF they only switched to building from git after they were notified of the backdoor yesterday. Prior to that, the source tarball was used.
liblzma is the problem. sshd is just the first thing they found that it is attacking. liblzma is used by firefox and many other critical packages.
Arch does not directly link openssh to liblzma, and thus this attack vector is not possible. You can confirm this by issuing the following command:
ldd "$(command -v sshd)"
Yes, this sshd attack vector isn’t possible. However, they haven’t decomposed the exploit and we don’t know the extent of the attack. The reporter of the issue just scratched the surface. If you are using Arch, you should run pacman right now to downgrade.
They actually have an upgrade fix for it, at least for the known parts of it. Doing a standard system upgrade will replace the xz package with one with the known backdoor removed.
No, just update. It’s already fixed. Thats the point of rolling release.
Bold of you to assume I hare upgraded in the first place.
I switched it with 5.4, just in case.
Do not use ldd on untrusted binaries.
I executed the backdoor the other day when assessing the damage.
objdump is the better tool to use in this case.
Interestingly, looking at Gentoo’s package, they have both the github and tukaani.org URLs listed:
https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/blob/master/app-arch/xz-utils/xz-utils-5.6.1.ebuild#L28
From what I understand, those wouldn’t be the same tarball, and might have thrown an error.
The extent of the exploit is still being analyzed so I would update and keep your eye on the news. If you don’t need your computer you could always power down.