Supply Chain Attacks on Linux distributions - Overview
fenrisk.com
  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMEnglish
    111·
    6 hours ago

    Nice post, but your title is misleading: the blog post is actually titled “Supply Chain Attacks on Linux distributions - Overview” - the word “attacks” as used here is a synonym for “vulnerabilities”. It is not completely clear from their title if this is going to be a post about vulnerabilities being discovered, or about them actually being exploited maliciously, but the latter is at least not strongly implied.

    This lemmy post however is titled (currently, hopefully OP will retitle it after this comment) “Supply Chain Attack found in Fedora’s Pagure and openSUSE’s Open Build Service”. edit: @OP thanks for changing the title!

    Adding the word “found” (and making “Attack” singular) changes the meaning: this title strongly implies that a malicious party has actually been detected performing a supply chain attack for real - which is not what this post is saying at all. (It does actually discuss some previous real-world attacks first, but it is not about finding those; the new findings in this post are vulnerabilities which were never attacked for real.)

    I recommend using the original post title (minus its “Overview” suffix) or keeping your more verbose title but changing the word “Attack” to “Vulnerabilities” to make it clearer.

    TLDR: These security researchers went looking for supply chain vulnerabilities, and found several bugs in two different systems. After responsibly disclosing them, they did these (very nice and accessible, btw - i recommend reading them) writeups about two of the bugs. The two they wrote up are similar in that they both involve going from being able to inject command line arguments, to being able to write to a file, to being able to execute arbitrary code (in a context which would allow attackers to perform supply chain attacks on any software distributed via the targeted infrastructure).

  • LordPassionFruit@lemm.ee
    27·
    3 days ago

    I’ve tried reading through the article, but unfortunately, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed. I use openSUSE, how does this affect me, and what do I need to do/what can I do about this?

      • blackbrook@mander.xyz
        52·
        3 days ago

        Do you mean the specific exploit performed by the author has been fixed? Or the general vulnerability that this exploit was intended to demonstrate has been fixed? The article ends with a What’s Next section discussing the difficulty of the latter, saying

        we don’t think there’s a silver bullet to address the risks caused by the compromise of such central pieces of infrastructure

        and going into detail about the challenges for openSUSE OBS. Are you claiming those challenges have all been solved and exploits like this are no longer possible?

        • Leaflet@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          6·
          2 days ago

          The authors found and reported vulnerabilities in Pagure and Open Build Service. These vulnerabilities have since been fixed.

    • JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world
      14·
      3 days ago

      Usually with vulnerabilities like this, they’re not gonna say anything about it until after they patch it so that people don’t go abuse it

  • blackbrook@mander.xyz
    7·
    3 days ago

    Supply chain attacks have been a trendy topic in the past years. Has the meaning of ‘trendy’ changed from what I’m used to?