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Yes, nothing points to the inventor of the format and maintainer for decades has done anything with the format to make it suspect. If so, the recent backdoor wouldn't be needed.
It's good to be skeptic, but don't drag people through the mud without anything to back it up.
Also, the exploit shows a high effort, and a high level of competence, and a very obvious willingness to play a long game. These are not circumstances for applying Hanlon's razor.
It's weird to have one set of standards to a maintainer since 2009 or so, and different standards for others. This witch hunt is just post-hoc smartassery.
And this is in part because I can not even tell for sure that he even exists. If I had met him a few times in a bar, I would be more inclined to believe he is not involved.
See what I did there?
Uh, because it's a compression library?
https://git.tukaani.org/?p=xz.git;a=blob;f=README;h=ac812ff1...
Yes.
Without evidence to the contrary there is no reason to believe Lasse has been anything other than genuine so all you're doing is insulting and slandering them out of personal satisfaction.
And conspiratorial witch hunts are actively counter-productive, through that mode of thinking it doesn't take much imagination to figure out you are part of the conspiracy for instance.
1. An important project has an overburdened / burnt out maintainer, and that project is taken over by a persona who appears to help kindly, but is part of a campaign of a state actor.
2. A state actor is involved in setting up such a project from the start.
The first possibility is not only being an asshole to the original maintainer, but it is also more risky - that original maintainer surely feels responsible for his creation and could ring alarm bells. This is not unlikely because he knows the code. And alarm bells is something that state actors do not like.
The second possibility has the risk of the project not being successful, which would mean a serious investment in resources to fail. But that could be countered by having competent people working on that. And in that case, you don't have any real persons,just account names.
What happened here? I don't know.
The original maintainer has said in the past, before Jia Tan's increased involvement and stepping up as a maintainer, that he couldn't put as much into the project due to mental health and other reasons [1]. Seems to fit possibility number one rather well.
If you suspect that Lasse Collin was somehow in it from the start, that'd mean the actor orchestrated the whole thing about mental health and not being able to keep up with sole maintainership. Why would they even do that if they had the project under their control already?
Of course we don't know what's really been happening with the project recently, or who's behind the backdoor and how. But IMO creating suspicions about the original maintainer's motives based entirely on speculation is also a bit assholey.
edit: [1] https://www.mail-archive.com/xz-devel@tukaani.org/msg00567.h...
More layers of obfuscation. For example in order to be able to attribute the backdoor to a different party.
It is of course also possible that Lasse Collins is a nice real person who just has not been able to review this. Maybe he is too ill,or has to care for an ill spouse, or perhaps he is not even alive any more. Who knows him as a person (not just an account name) and knows how he is doing?
They don't even need plausible deniability, groups like the NSA have been caught spying on everyone and it doesn't hurt them all that much. The publicity isn't ideal. But it only confirms what we already new - turns out the spies are spying on people! Who knew.
There are probably dozens if not hundreds of this sort of attempt going on right now. I'd assume most don't get caught. Or go undetected for a many years which is good enough enough. If you have government money on the budget, it makes sense to go with large-volume low-effort attempts rather than try some sort of complex good-cop-bad-cop routine.
But to establish a significant contributor to a key piece of software, not unlike xz, is an ideal position for a state actor. The developer doesn't even need to know who/why, but they could be financially/ideologically aligned. This is what intelligence officers do. They manage real human assets who exist naturally. But to have someone long-established as an author of a project is the exact type of asset they want. Even if they push the code, people immediately start considering how it could have been done by someone else. Yes, it's conspiratorial/paranoid thinking but there's nothing more paranoid than state intelligence trade craft.
https://git.tukaani.org/?p=xz.git;a=commit;h=f9cf4c05edd14de...