The Mystery of 'Jia Tan,' the XZ Backdoor Mastermind

wired.com

8 points·breadwinner··5 comments

> "As for which nation, Raiu names the usual suspects: China, Russia, and North Korea. He says it’s still too early to know the true culprit."

Why isn't the NSA's Tailored Access Operations on that list? Use of the name 'Jia Tan' would fit right in with the obfuscation and misdirection approach of US intelligence agencies (see Marble Framework in the Vault7 leaks), and introducing backdoors that only they know about would be viewed as a big win in Washington, as much as in Moscow or Beijing.

https://github.com/hackerhouse-opensource/Marble

at least on a surface-level analysis, the work was done in China's timezone[0]

of course, you can get computers to say all sorts of things about what the time is where they're geographically located, but it's not nothing.

i do find it strange that there hasn't been much discussion about what was in the object file, but maybe that just takes time.

https://rheaeve.substack.com/p/xz-backdoor-times-damned-time...

So the tar ball can have object files as well? I thought tar balls were strictly source.

tar is just an archive format, you can have any type of file in a tar file.

From the article

> The backdoor’s careful design could be the work of US hackers, Raiu notes, but he suggests that’s unlikely, since the US wouldn’t typically sabotage open source projects—and if it did, the National Security Agency would probably use a quantum-resistant cryptographic function, which ED448 is not.

I'm not personally knowledgeable enough to assess this claim.

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