We literally have no idea how many xz-style compromises are out there in the wild. We got really lucky with xz - it was only found because the backdoor was sloppy with performance and a microsoft employee got curious. But we have no data on all the times we got unlucky. How many packages in the linux ecosystem are compromised in this way? Maybe none? Maybe lots? We just don't know.
I'm sure any binary blobs in OSS software, no matter what the reason for having them will be viewed with suspicion, and build scripts get extra inspection after that.
Maybe I'm naive in thinking that some people are already looking into packages that are included in all base Linux builds? Including simplifying the build env, and making sure that the the build tools themselves (cmake, pkgconfig, gmake, autotools etc) are also not compromised.
Suspected to be targetted, in a way that seems to have 0% chance of succeeding for almost any project. Which is why nothing happened.
Its obviously more than 0% given xz was successfully taken over and backdoored. Even a 5% chance of malicious takeover per project would make the situation pretty worrying given how many well funded, motivated government agencies are out there.
I did quote the "three JS projects were targeted in failed attempts" bit, which should have made that abundantly clear.
People have also done the same thing (to great effect) on the chrome extension “store” to get all manner of malware into chrome extension updates.
“Nobody unsubtle was successful” tells us nothing about the success rate of subtle attackers. It’s like looking at all the dodgy ssh and http requests any host on the internet is connected to and concluding “yep, 0% of low effort script kiddie attacks get through. I’m 100% safe from hackers!”
I don’t have confidence that people are looking for evidence of potential exploitation because of reasons like the ones you bring up.
So we’re back to we just don’t know.
Its especially difficult because most projects aren't built in a reproducible way. You should be able to uncompress and compare a source tarball. But if you get a binary and the source code used to generated that binary, there's no way to tell that they match.
It's still not trivial because there might well be legitimate processing steps that are used to create the tarball, but it should be doable.
A large class of exploitation methods simply have no performance impact.
The reason Jia Tan could do their thing is because 1) the main meat was in a binary test file, 2) the code to use that seemed relatively harmless at a glance, and 3) people were encouraged to use the .tar.gz files instead of git clone. Also you need to actual get maintainer status, which is not as easy as it sounds.
I've been thinking of inserting a "// THIS LINE IS MALICIOUS, PLEASE REPORT IF YOU SEE IT" in some of my projects to see how long it would take. I bet it would be pretty fast either after commit or after tagging a release.
// this line is an external audit test - a free gift card to the first person to report finding it.Tools that use LLMs to review code will catch such projects.