But seriously, we could have found ourselves with this in all stable repos: RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu, IoT devices 5 years from now and it would have been a much larger shit show.
Whats more likely - that this is the only backdoor like this in linux, or that there are more out there and this is the one we happened to find?
I really hope someone is out there testing for all of this stuff in linux:
- Look for system() calls in compiled binaries and check all of them
- Look for uses of IFUNC - specifically when a library uses IFUNC to replace other functions in the resulting executable
- Make a list of all the binaries / libraries which don't landlock. Grep the sourcecode of all those projects and make sure none of them expect to be using landlock.
If you had a human-asset with decision making authority and trust in place, then as funded organization with regular working hours, you'd simply can the project and start prototyping new potential uses.
But I don't think valuable government targets are in any hurry to upgrade. I wouldn't expect widespread adoption of 24.04, even in the private sector, until well after the U.S. election.
By the next election, though, everyone will be running it.
Edit: According to another comment [1], there would only have been a short window of vulnerability during which this attack would have worked, due to changes in systemd. This might have increased pressure on the attacker to act quickly.
Think about backdoors that are already present and will never be found out.
But one possible reason is if the FBI is convinced that something the NSA is doing is illegal. They may not always be inclined to tolerate that.
I'd noticed that; this seems to have been the case for a long time. You'd think that having state security agencies at war with one-another would be a disaster, but perhaps it's a feature: a sort of social "layered security". At any rate, it seems much better than having a bunch of state security agencies that all sing from the same songsheet.
So rulers in all ages tended to create multiple different security apparatuses for themselves and their states, and often actively encouraged rivalries between them, even if that makes them less efficient.