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Comment by withinboredom | Hacker News Reader

It’s got me suspicious of build-time dependency we have in an open source tool, where the dependency goes out of its way to prefer xz and we even discovered that it installs xz on the host machine if it isn’t already installed — as a convenience. Kinda weird because it didn’t do that for any other dependencies.

These long-games are kinda scary and until whatever “evil” is actually done you have no idea what is actually malicious or just weird.

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> It’s got me suspicious of build-time dependency we have in an open source tool, where the dependency goes out of its way to prefer xz and we even discovered that it installs xz on the host machine if it isn’t already installed — as a convenience. Kinda weird because it didn’t do that for any other dependencies.

Have you considered reaching out to the maintainers of that project and (politely) asking them to explain? In lieu of recent events I don't think anyone would blame you, in fact you might even suggest they explain such an oddly specific side effect in a README or such.

> Have you considered reaching out to the maintainers of that project and (politely) asking them to explain?

That's kind of a catch-22, right? They'd explain with a seemingly good answer if they did it for actual reasons. They'll still explain with a seemingly good answer if they did it for nefarious reasons.

I don't have a good answer to this except to monitor this dependency and its changes.

Is it possible that it was added by a bad actor, and that most of the individuals in contact will not have signed off on it? I mean, this whole thing started by an interested party digging deeper than anyone else had, you could trigger that for someone else. At the very least, what do you have to lose? If the best they can do is look like they're fine, then every possible side effect is to root up a frighteningly well hidden inflator

They’d definitely have a great answer up their sleeves.

The crazy thing is the devs responsible for the XZ backdoor are among us and will likely be here on HN, downvoting comments which are getting close to the truth and upvoting each other.

The bad people are definitely here.

I'm not sure it's a catch-22, there are many possibilities and subsequent outcomes. I would just want to satiate my curiosity.

You assume they'll have a good reason, but they may not. They could be a malicious actor but also suck at it, and you might spook them into reconsidering. Or they may be fully innocent and just suck at packaging and distributing software and you might help them learn something.

If they do have a good reason, it should stand on its own merits when presented. Anyone could be up to no good and they might be plotting the end of the world, but they also might coincidentally and not relatedly happen to like xz-utils a lot.

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