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Comment by andrewinardeer | Hacker News Reader

I believe this is a nation state actor and there are a a fleet of 'Jia Tans' working on other OSS projects to backdoor operating systems.

And some have probably succeeded.

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I wouldn't limit that to OSS projects. How many of them managed to get hired and are working for Microsoft, Apple, Google, Oracle or Amazon?

In some cases they don't even need to introduce backdoors themselves but just review and spot bugs they don't correct or raise issues for but communicate to mothership. They could even work in team with having one building the backdoor and the other approving the code.

Most companies have more thorough processes to avoid this but that doesn't mean those processes are applied correctly everytime, especially if more than one malicious engineer is involved.

I'm now imagining a department where every single worker is a spy for different government and they play endless game of "add exploit, close off the other people's exploits". And all of them think they are the 10x developer because all the other people do in their view is pushing shoddy code

I worked on a project just like this once.. a mobile phone network build in the middle east before the arab spring. 10/10 would not repeat the experience.

> Most companies have more thorough processes to avoid this but that doesn't mean those processes are applied correctly everytime, especially if more than one malicious engineer is involved.

I’d also bet that you could exploit the tiers at many companies: how many places have more robust review for the staff engineers but then assume that some lowly “ops monkey” will take care of the build environment, etc.? I’d hope that wouldn’t work at Google, Microsoft, etc. but have heard enough stories about disparities between which jobs are contracted out and which have the coveted FAANG benefits that I wouldn’t exactly be shocked if it turned out otherwise.

Most of the time they don't need infiltrators. Governments can just pressure companies with export controls or warrantless surveillance to get backdoors into commercial systems. OSS projects require different methods because the more direct method would be discarded by the community and forked.

> Most of the time they don't need infiltrators. Governments can just pressure companies with export controls or warrantless surveillance to get backdoors into commercial systems.

Or they simply pay companies with a “support contract” in return for embedding spyware that sells out customers. Seen that first hand (private key exfiltration), resigned the same day.

Lots of comments saying we need to do something about the OSS supply chain but in my estimation the problem is much worse with closed source commercial software.

Deleted.

The thing is they only need one member sometimes, to observe what is in use.

Example scenario: "malicious engineer in say Microsoft, finds out that office365 is using xz internally and the library is pulled directly without code review. Same engineer or another member of same group would be that Jia Tan doing the necessary backdooring in xz to target office365. And bam all worlwide Office365 accounts would be backdoored."

I am not saying Office365 is using xz, I have no idea really, but this would be a possible scenario. I know MsTeams is using ffmpeg for example.

So I think having this discussion while only scoping linux distributions is a big mistake. xz project was particularly interesting as a target as it is distributed under BSD zero-close license, which is pretty much a public domain license. You don't have the attribution part of the BSD license so there are probably myriads of proprietary software using it too without them acknowledging it.

> I wouldn't limit that to OSS projects. How many of them managed to get hired and are working for Microsoft, Apple, Google, Oracle or Amazon?

They don't have to sneak into those companies tho, they just hand over something like a national security letter and do whatever they want while making it clear to the heads of the company that anyone who talks or pushes back will rot in gitmo. Why wouldn't there be at least an equivalent to Room 641A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) in every major US corporation that deals with massive amounts of people's sensitive data and communication?

I believe the term "nation state actor" is a term that means "country" but with the bonus of connoting that the writer is an armchair infosec wizard. This speculation is not valuable without adding information, otherwise it's just McCarthyist bluster.

Whales is a country but it is not a nation-state and probably does not have its own APT.

I'll bite. Wales is a country only in a "traditional" sense, since it does not currently hold the type of sovereignty we require of "countries" in the usual sense. As Voltaire said, "This body which called itself and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.".

Wales, when independent, could reasonably be described as a nation state, being roughly associated with the Welsh people and their culture, language, history etc. But most countries are not nation states! The USA, Russia, and China for instance are explicitly plurinational.

If you think "nation" and "state" are synonyms (along with "country") then it's redundant to use both. If you think that "state" alone might lead someone to think of Alabama or Minas Gerais then say "nation". If you think "nation" will make people think of Cherokee, then say "country" or "sovereign state".

"Nation state" has a specific and well-established meaning, misusing it is like misusing any other jargon and just comes across as a failed attempt to seem part of the ingroup and hence authoritative.

(yes, apparently I will die on this hill)

Are there any actual nation states? Even small countries, like Greece, contain other nationalities.

Greece is certainly a nation state, being primarily occupied by "Greeks" (referring the the nebulous concept of a national identity). It doesn't matter if some French or Turks live there.

A country that strictly limited residency by ethnic identity might be called an "ethnostate" and indeed it's hard to find a pure example of one of those.

Nation state actor is a standard info sec term. Using it does not imply any kind of wizardry.

Edit: most threat actors do not have the patience or the motive to behave in this way. It is reasonable to suppose that this is a nation state actor.

There are organised crime networks which buy 0-days to run ransomware, and actively target companies to do it.

Why couldn't this be an attempt at finding or selling exploit access on the black market?

The problem here is no one is looking properly at the scope. It's more then trivial so everyone is leaping for "nation-state" as though that's the only threat actor with motivation and patience.

Granted, other threat actors remain a possibility, there is no proof.

It looks like the sort of thing nation states would do and develop. It could be some other group hoping to make money as you say.

Whoever they are, they seem to have good opsec, over multiple years.

It's also a term that implies the competent, official hacking departments or espionage agencies of that country, rather than government-supported amateurs (e.g. an untrained policeman) or generic people from that country.

At this point, considering the apparent ease with which a project that is used pretty much everywhere was taken over, that seems like a reasonable position.

I can walk out on the street and stab someone to death if I wanted to. This is surprisingly easy.

Just because something is relatively easy to pull off doesn't mean it happens a lot.

It's also not that easy to pull off because you need to have a project with relatively few eyes and a place to hide it. In this case: binary tests. But most projects don't have those.

There is no evidence for any of this, including that it's a nation-state actor. There's also a case to be made that it's NOT a nation-state actor as nation states use Linux and want a secure Linux. The NSA and such have somewhat conflicting interests here. We just don't know. It's likely we will never know.

All of this is starting to resemble the spy paranoia of the first world war. A few spies got caught and suddenly everyone was now a suspected German spy (including a general, if I recall correctly, who was detained for a while because he couldn't answer a question about baseball or some such).

I suspect that very soon people will start demanding maintainers put some of their blood in a Petri dish to be tested with a hot needle. Just in case.

> There's also a case to be made that it's NOT a nation-state actor as nation states use Linux and want a secure Linux. The NSA and such have somewhat conflicting interests here. We just don't know.

I agree that we do not know that it’s a nation-state but this point seems to work in the opposite direction: this attack was very carefully constructed so only someone with a particular key pair could exploit it. That’s reminiscent of what the NSA did with the Dual EC constants, and they were confident enough about that to push it into the FIPS requirements for federal IT.

Motive, opportunity, means - and consequences: it is primarily the absence of a motive, and secondarily the likelihood of consequences, that keeps the prevalence of street stabbings way lower that if means and opportunity were the only factors.

The argument against nation-states being involved has some problems: a state can avoid becoming victim to its own work, while its own restraint would not prevent developments elsewhere.

You're commenting under a link where commits to the xz-decoder are discussed. Some level of paranoia is warranted.

The binary files look like a sideshow in comparison. Maybe we're lucky the attacker was tempted to hide something in there.

> I believe this is a nation state actor

It is certainly possible, but we don't really have a good indication for that. This whole thing would be definitely doable by a single individual.

doable yes, but what seems to me like a strong indication is the duration, multiple years, and the effort to set up a quasi patch infrastructure for the backdoor which I can't remember ever having seen in some amateur or ransomware hack.

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