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182 points yarapavan | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.825s | source
1. ndiddy ◴[] No.43614890[source]
> The OpenSSH project is careful about not taking on unnecessary dependencies, but Debian was not as careful. That distribution patched sshd to link against libsystemd, which in turn linked against a variety of compression packages, including xz's liblzma. Debian's relaxing of sshd's dependency posture was a key enabler for the attack, as well as the reason its impact was limited to Debian-based systems such as Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora, avoiding other distributions such as Arch, Gentoo, and NixOS.

Does Fedora use Debian's patch set for sshd, or a similar patch set that adds libsystemd?

Edit: It looks like Fedora wasn't affected because the backdoor triggered a valgrind test failure, so they shipped it with a flag that disabled the functionality that was backdoored. Seems like they lucked out. https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fe...

replies(2): >>43615739 #>>43619696 #
2. ◴[] No.43615739[source]
3. aragilar ◴[] No.43619696[source]
I'm not sure show Fedora is derived from Debian...

If I recall correctly, the backdoor was set up to only activate on rpm and deb based systems, so it wouldn't have been trigged on Arch, Gentoo or NixOS, even if they linked systemd to ssh.