-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 On Wed, 2021-08-11 at 23:30 -0400, Timothy M Butterworth wrote: > All, > > I just ran across this article > https://blog.ikuamike.io/posts/2021/package_managers_privesc/ I tested > the attacks on Debian 11 and they work successfully giving me a root > shell prompt. > > Tim
Thank you for bringing this to everyone's attention. This are very real vulnerabilities. NPM has similar issues with stopping malicious packages from being published to the FTP server. They have made some improvements after they were aware of the issue, but I haven't heard any new developments at NPM about how to stop malicious packages from making it to the server. Malicious packages can and do make it into the dependency sets of popular packages. This is a problem. I don't think that any amount of human effort and attention can prevent malicious packages from making it to the FTP server. I think that AI would be better-equipped to handle the critical checks necessary for FTP upload security to be top-of-the-line. The AI couldn't just be left unchecked, though, and humans are still needed to monitor, tweak, and make sure the AI is working and behaving in a responsible manner. As far as behaving responsibly is concerned, the main issue I foresee is having the AI flag false positives, and making sure the AI doesn't evolve into something insidious. I'm not sure if that last point can exist within limited AI, because I am not an AI expert. Perhaps a workaround for users right now would be to have a user with package management sudo access, and not much else. sudo access for package managers would have to be disallowed at the root and [other] user levels. I am not even sure that this would even work for all use cases, and having a manual ad-hoc hotfix is far from ideal. What does the Debian community think about this? Also, we should notify our upstream projects, and the Linux community as a whole, of these vulnerabilities. I believe that to be a moral obligation. - -- Best regards, Brian T. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQJHBAEBCgAxFiEE9fpVo96/flopdKOfgw2Ncu3Nhn0FAmEUm8ATHGJyaWFuQGhh c2h2YXVsdC5pbwAKCRCDDY1y7c2GfYQuD/47aYb4u7hIZ0n8yAdfzPVHVjvYrOzc Ke7sSSHktgtsBPxWulXjwggm4/XlYlk06TEmDycr60/Ql1ncPZkZ9L2WaKUWabiy fZ3wSaN7Sd8fCM2ls4GGr6m66UiqjIYzmlJJrn3WdVQxXvuMULWPyD2yGEYbLydu QQynSkB18OzTxNtwZYEBV7y7Qe69vZBFa0jfd4kH+zLk6lbmyHLFKn8smnFVQdby uaFGynpX5faYTeY7ccBUkeveBJMUJcomDlzJZ6XbsmSvaDgX1aPJNkkOzirr8L/5 ilSzydrtifmrvkBcvcesPwEwqHp9xMExYazM7Nz1iLhqafYZHMOiwFnQDF9Tn0cW mTIEzqz5Jbk9LoBxNMxfcPAd6XHGK/zntUbNhxDGNqgnYHjeWhIKWNj6qAP8yKPp 8W1loXMoKyHeE1A4d7ILJNYczYoGz5V2QlfXgHnWgwzrATDmqs6RHmhHM4BNKYTl AQAMili65MdULWwkKjtDHube8UVxLyKxkLgfRChSrXq8mkhSb9zRyqthv5z87G84 pKeiy92TXxkV/KZfWyMX8naYnnckcA9x4FS7tLZGqPN6fqRpUNW8XM3snaW99Jbk GqlCpE1XkQXDhdb3TPd8Uo3FQAVbgce9tmec99HGhWpBrMtay4N7p1xLUQG/mbNM uyrGcXtiLlGefQ== =iA8K -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----