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miduil

2,632 karma · joined November 18, 2013

I just can't code. absolute pseudo sysadmin. hacking in spaces since 2011 visit hæcker.net
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miduil··on Xzbot: Notes, honeypot, and exploit demo for the xz backdoor
> is that now that we have a POC, we need a way to check for vulnerable servers.

You misunderstand me, the "need to check for vulnerable servers" has nothing to do with the PoC in itself. You want to know whether you're vulnerable against this mysterious unknown attacker that went through the all the hoops for a sophisticated supply chain attack. I never said that we need a way to detect it because there is a POC out, at least I didn't meant to imply that either.

> script kiddies to use it, meaning we're in a race against them

This is something you and the other person were suddenly coming up with, never said this in first place.

miduil··on Xzbot: Notes, honeypot, and exploit demo for the xz backdoor
*host key fingerprint, but I assume what you've meant.

It's practically a good backdoor then, crypto graphically protected and safe against "re-play" attacks.

miduil··on Xzbot: Notes, honeypot, and exploit demo for the xz backdoor
> It doesn't matter.

To understand the exact behavior and extend of the backdoor, this does matter. An end to end proof of how it works is exactly what was needed.

> A way to check if servers are vulnerable is probably by querying the package manager

Yes, this has been know since the initial report + later discovering what exact strings are present for the payload.

https://github.com/Neo23x0/signature-base/blob/master/yara/b...

> Not very sophisticated, but it'll work.

Unfortunately, we live in a world with closed-servers and appliances - being able as a customer or pen tester rule out certain class of security issues without having the source/insights available is usually desirable.

miduil··on Xzbot: Notes, honeypot, and exploit demo for the xz backdoor
It's a POC nevertheless, it's a complete implementation of the RCE minus obviously the private key.
miduil··on Xzbot: Notes, honeypot, and exploit demo for the xz backdoor
Super impressed how quickly the community and in particular amlweems were able to implement and document a POC. If the cryptographic or payload loading functionality has no further vulnerabilities, this would have been also at least not introducing a security flaw to all the other attackers until the key is broken or something.

Edit: I think what's next for anyone is to figure out a way to probe for vulnerable deployments (which seems non-trivial) and also perhaps possibly ?upstreaming? a way to monitor if someone actively probes ssh servers with the hardcoded key.

Kudos!

miduil··on Ask HN: ELI5 the Xz Attack/Vuln
Computers with internet access can be remote controlled. Usually computers are like houses, only if you have the right key or are invited you are allowed to enter. The remote controller uses apps that combines other apps to allow remote controlling. One of the apps was changed with bad intentions so someone who is not invited can enter computers they don't own and see what is inside the computer or use the computer for themselves.
miduil··on Reported Supply Chain Compromise Affecting XZ Utils Data Compression Library
no
miduil··on Reported Supply Chain Compromise Affecting XZ Utils Data Compression Library
Gotta love that they're now suggesting to downgrade to 5.4.6 with a link to the now defunct (and under control of the same authors) repository. They should have probably released hash and version of a not affected source tarball.
miduil··on Backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to SSH server compromise
Ah, thanks for correcting me there - really weird that this isn't visible from the profile itself. Not even from the organization.

The following page for each other show both accounts suspended indeed.

https://github.com/Larhzu?tab=following

https://github.com/JiaT75?tab=following

miduil··on Backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to SSH server compromise
Not true, the original author wasn't suspended: https://github.com/Larhzu

https://github.com/JiaT75 was suspended for a moment, but isn't anymore?

miduil··on Backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to SSH server compromise
This is getting addressed here: https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz/issues/11760
miduil··on Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison
It's a bit of a different scale/topic, but I found the discourse here quite insightful. It talks about the method "Restorative Justice" by going through a concrete example where this was lacking. Really heartwarming to listen to.

https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/how-to-make-amends/

miduil··on I scraped all of OpenAI's Community Forum
That's an interesting write-up, I wonder how this would look for other big Discourse communities such as NixOS.
miduil··on Wrangling 2000 Git Repos at Reddit
I can't believe how it is working in such a big structure with just GitHub alone. GitLab with groups/subgroups and also integrated sourcegraph seems such more practical at this scale.
miduil··on Story of Vitamin D Toxicity (2022)
Source?
miduil··on HashiCorp Exploring Potential Sale
Software Company HashiCorp Is Weighing a Potential Sale (bloomberg.com)

65 points by MajimasEyepatch 1 day ago | 49 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39721381

miduil··on Nix is a better Docker image builder than Docker's image builder
The way I've set this up for our macos devs at work was a script that runs nix builds inside docker-for-desktop using the official nixos upstream docker image (and some tricks to get ssh forwarding, filesystem mounts, ...) working. Works quite alright. Benefit is you don't need some weird Linux remote builder vm with ssh running.
miduil··on Mozilla will be retiring the Mozilla Location Service
Thank you Skyhook Holdings, Inc.
miduil··on TextSnatcher: Copy text from images, for the Linux Desktop
If you just put `set -o errexit -o pipefail -o nounset` in the first line after the shebang your script will have proper error-handling as well. Currently if any fails, notify-send will still be triggered.
miduil··on Show HN: macOS-cross-compiler – Compile binaries for macOS on Linux
Hm, need to give this* a try with NixOS cross compilation for macos. If I could pre-build nix packages for macOS developers on linux build hosts that'd be awesome.

*the building blocks

miduil··on AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source
Wow, this is great news. I really hope that the community will find ways to sustainable fund this project, being suddenly run a lot of innovative CUDA based projects on AMD GPUs is a big game-changer, especially because you don't have to deal with the poor state of nvidia on linux support.
miduil··on Show HN: #!/usr/bin/env docker run
Totally, some practical use of that here as well:

https://dpc.pw/posts/nix-users-you-can-start-using-rust-scri...

miduil··on PainStation
tried this out last year at the computer game museum and it is definitively very much fun to play, even if you're worse at pong than your enemy you might win if the enemy receives the pain by surprise. i also received some minor skin damage by the whipping onto my hand
miduil··on Tesla Network Traffic [video]
I know there is always the balance between fault tolerance, which is a highly valued good for a car, and complying with specs and how things "should be".

Certainly, requesting DHCP and re-authenticating with a Wi-Fi router is nothing you should do - in particular if your unencrypted HTTP request to Akamai is 404'ing. I wonder what is supposed to be returned there.

Overall it seems to me that this whole system was rushed and the never touch again since it is kinda working.

miduil··on Spacedrive – an open source cross-platform file explorer
Super nice someone working through this, as it's the perfect target for Tauri, the motivation inside the GitHub makes it an exciting project that goes beyond just a regular file browser.

Since it has some glorified web app functionality, a non-tauri web demo with a remote `core` daemon would be super nice.

miduil··on Researchers find link between plastic additive and autism, ADHD
> [...] Future studies with stricter inclusion criteria are required to confirm the present findings.

This is a small study that doesn't earn such a big subject line.

> BPA is about 10 percent less than that of control children. For a significant proportion of children with ADHD, it’s about 17 percent less.

The percentages are confusing me, BPA intake can vary greatly - if there was a stronger link shouldn't this be much obvious just in folks with higher BPA exposure?

Also there are bunch of metabolic conditions/disorders linked with autism already.

I don't understand what you would learn from such research other than "more research needed", certainly not what the headline implies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_autism#Metabolic_dis...

miduil··on A customer stuck due to a hurricane who needed SSH
Honestly I also wonder now, I've read through the OpenSSH release notes which is one single HTML page with all releases since 2000, but unfortunately couldn't quickly spot when they would have introduced this change.

https://www.openssh.com/releasenotes.html

miduil··on Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats
Simply not true https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/social-media-news/t...
miduil··on [dead]
So the US probably has made more tax benefit (by inflation increasing tax income, which with cold progression won't create same spending as income) than it spent supporting.
miduil··on Add dir=“auto” to your inputs and textareas
There is also this shortcut of ctrl+shift+x to switch to RTL. Which is really funny when you do it on Twitter since it flips the entire user interface.
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