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Sudo maintainer, handling utility for more than 30 years, is looking for support (www.theregister.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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It's hard to imagine something as fundamental to computing as the sudo command becoming abandonware, yet here we are: its solitary maintainer is asking for help to keep the project alive.

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[–] 28 points 7 months ago (4 children)

To be honest, it wouldn't take much for distro maintainers to detect that and stop it

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    But who is seriously looking at the sudo code at every update. I would bet a lot of money that the vast majority simply trust him and gloss over it maximum.

    The chain of trust has to exist otherwise distrobox maintainers would spend 24 hours a day reviewing code changes and only update once every 6 months.

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  • [–] 10 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    You may want to look into how the xz backdoor has been discovered. That backdoor was very well hidden. Implementing a crypto mining malware would be blatantly obvious and yes, people do in fact look at such code

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago

    Yes, but people are forgetting how it was discovered.

    It was discovered because there was a visible performance impact by running benchmark tests on other, time-critical software.

    Do you know how it was not discovered? By maintainers looking through changes of the software and looking through the code, exactly the way that the commenter and you and others are saying things would be caught.

    If the attacker hadn't been so eager and only set it to start working after a time delay a year later or multiple updates later? It would have infected almost every server in the world, even if it got noticed immediately, it would have been a giant problem that would have reaped the benefits for the malicious party before it could be regressed and changed.

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