Re: Sourceware mitigating and preventing the next xz-backdoor

[Jonathon Anderson <anderson.jonathonm@gmail.com>]

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On Tue, 2024-04-09 at 16:11 -0400, Paul Koning wrote:
>
> On Apr 9, 2024, at 3:59 PM, Jonathon Anderson via Gcc <[gcc@gcc.gnu.org](mailto:gcc@gcc.gnu.org)> wrote:
>
> > CMake has its own sandbox and rules and escapes (granted, much more of
> > them). But regardless, the injection code would be committed to the
> > repository (point 2) and would not hold up to a source directory mounted
> > read-only (point 3).
> 
> Why would the injection code necessarily be committed to the repository?  It wasn't in the xz attack -- one hole in the procedures is that the kits didn't match the repository and no checks caught this.  I don't see how a different build system would cure that issue.  Instead, there needs to be some sort of audit that verifies there aren't rogue or modified elements in the kit.

In Autotools, `make dist` produces a tarball that contains many files not present in the source respoitory, it includes build system core files and this fact was used for the xz attack. In contrast, for newer build systems the "release tarball" is purely a snapshot of the source repository: there is no `cmake dist`, and `meson dist` is essentially `git archive` ([docs](https://mesonbuild.com/Creating-releases.html)). Thus for the injection code to be present in the release tarball, it needs to have first been checked into the repository.

In fact, packagers don't *need* to use the tarballs, they can (and should) use the Git history from the source repository itself. In Debian this is one workflow implemented by the popular git-buildpackage ([docs](https://honk.sigxcpu.org/projects/git-buildpackage/manual-html/gbp.import.upstream-git.html)). The third-party package manager [Spack](https://spack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/packaging_guide.html#git) clones directly from the source repository. Others may have support for this as well, this isn't a novel idea.

-Jonathon