Items tagged security, opensource in 2024
Filters: Year: 2024 × security × opensource × Sorted by date
Bullying in Open Source Software Is a Massive Security Vulnerability. The Xz story from last month, where a malicious contributor almost managed to ship a backdoor to a number of major Linux distributions, included a nasty detail where presumed collaborators with the attacker bullied the maintainer to make them more susceptible to accepting help.
Hans-Christoph Steiner from F-Droid reported a similar attempt from a few years ago:
A new contributor submitted a merge request to improve the search, which was oft requested but the maintainers hadn't found time to work on. There was also pressure from other random accounts to merge it. In the end, it became clear that it added a SQL injection vulnerability.
404 Media's Jason Koebler ties the two together here and makes the case for bullying as a genuine form of security exploit in the open source ecosystem. # 9th May 2024, 10:26 pm
gchq.github.io/CyberChef (via) CyberChef is “the Cyber Swiss Army Knife—a web app for encryption, encoding, compression and data analysis”—entirely client-side JavaScript with dozens of useful tools for working with different formats and encodings.
It’s maintained and released by GCHQ—the UK government’s signals intelligence security agency.
I didn’t know GCHQ had a presence on GitHub, and I find the URL to this tool absolutely delightful. They first released it back in 2016 and it has over 3,700 commits.
The top maintainers also have suitably anonymous usernames—great work, n1474335, j433866, d98762625 and n1073645. # 26th March 2024, 5:08 pm