Commit 77a294d
Update maintainer and author info. The other maintainer suddenly disappeared.
Lmao, that’s putting it lightly.
the other maintainer now has a special place:
Special author: Jia Tan was a co-maintainer in 2022-2024. He and the team behind him inserted a backdoor (CVE-2024-3094) into XZ Utils 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 releases. He suddenly disappeared when this was discovered.
Can someone provide a summary on what this means? I thought there were malicious exploits in this. Why is it back up and the perpetrator unbanned?
Lasse is the original maintainer of XZ, they have been placed back in their position as sole maintainer.
“Jia Tan” was the person who slipped the backdoor into XZ and is now banned.
Lasse has already fixed abd removed the backdoor.
XZ itself is critical software everyone uses (its one of the main compression/decompression programs used on linux)
Yes but damage seems to be done. Distros are talking or have moved off of it to zstd.
There are some, probably. But any exodus will be slow. Xz isn’t useless because it was dangerous once.
Besides, XZ isn’t the only project in such a danger. Banning doesn’t solve that problem. They need to put in more funding and eyes.
I would argue this might make xz safer mid-term. So much eyes on it. I’m not familiar with other solutions, but who’s to say the bad actor won’t try a similar trick elsewhere
Exploits were removed. Maintainer who committed them still banned. xz is a critical piece of software.
This sounds just like something Jia Tan might say…
