On Mon, 1 Apr 2024 at 04:47, François Rigault <rigault.franc...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> To echo
>
> > To trust code, it needs to be reviewed.
> > If the code is reviewed, and the build system is sane, [..]
>
> I deduce from your response that the binary tests committed in systemd
> were not reviewed neither by co-maintainers nor by downstream package
> maintainers.
>
>
Are we talking about the blobs which contained the malware? Those blobs
were not in systemd, they were in the compression library. You are going to
see weird blobs in any compression library because compression needs to
test how it does against different data types.. especially binary data
because you need to see if you improved or worsened the compression with a
change. The places you are going to see binary data which may not make any
'sense' are: compression, anything graphics related, sound and general
archiving tools. You will find actually 'binaries' in various parts of any
compilation set because you may be linking or 'embedding' it into code that
will run something else.

But that is just where you are just sticking plain binary data. You can
uuencode, base64 or many other things and put it into regular code in
places where you might need to run some stuff. They went after ssh most
likely because the main target was internet based attacks. However they
could have gone a slightly different path and used dnf/apt (rpm/dpkg) as
the target application and placed additional scripts to open systems up
somewhere. This could be done with a nice bit of C code which usually does
one thing but for what would look like legitimate reasons does something
else after a certain date or code sequence. Anyone who has tried to read
through an obfuscated C contest entry can see where this is going.



> I understand that the build system used by systemd makes it much less
> probable that some binary blob used in a test obfuscates something that
> could be used for other purposes outside the test; still, wouldn't you
> agree it would be a good practice to make sure everyone is able to review
> everything in the source code repository?
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-- Ian MacClaren
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