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> The file, supposedly a corrupted XZ file, is actually a valid XZ stream with some bytes swapped — for example, 0x20 is swapped with occurrences of 0x09 and vice versa.

My under-caffeinated brain can't unsee that as a silly reference to the old tabs vs. spaces squabble. Maybe it's simply a rational obfuscation choice, or maybe it's indeed a masterstroke of satire.

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I think it’s a very shrewd use of that history: their goal was to get a potential reviewer to ignore it and pretty everyone qualified to look at that code has seen those specific values enough to likely tune it out as more tabs vs. spaces noise or perhaps think the original test case started with a file corrupted by some whitespace conversion process, which would be a very easy explanation since very similar things have legitimately happened to other projects.

Whoever did this shows signs of being very familiar with programming culture and I’d bet that this was another deliberate attempt to hide in the background noise.

Wait, you're right, 0x20 is space and 0x09 is ht/tab... they've swapped spaces for tabs...

The payload is supposedly a corrupted xz file. An overzealous "replace spaces with tabs" formatter could easily cause this sort of corruption, so it seems like a perfectly reasonable test case.

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