this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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Finally, presumably if anyone added some malicious code in a their program, it would be sneaky and not obvious from quickly reading the code.
I'd expect them to properly comment it with "#-------Begin malicious shit--------".
COMMENT YOUR CODE, PEOPLE!
The exploit should be written in a way that it is obvious and doesn't need commenting!
Oh, in that case we don't need to read either - just run a simple grep!
Those malicious coders are too sly for that. Some write "Sh1t" to throw grep off, others even do a "B3g1n"... They are always one step ahead!
Good point. I'd try to grep for something like
[Bb3][Ee3]g[Ii1][nη]\w+<and so on>but I just know I'll miss somethingWell yeah, the recent xz vulnerability was not present in the source code at all. Any amount of code reading would not have caught that one.
Wasn't the problem that ~~it~~ the backdoor was not present in the source code on GitHub, but was in the source tarball? So as long as one reads the code that one actually builds from should be fine.
A line of code that enables the backdoor was out present in the tarball. The actual code was obfuscated within an archive used for the unit testing.
OK. So simply reading what was readable wouldn't have helped. Thanks.