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OpenSSH Backdoors
Imagine this: an OpenSSH backdoor is discovered, maintainers rush to push out a fixed release package, security researchers trade technical details on mailing lists to analyze the backdoor code. Speculation abounds on the attribution and motives of the attacker, and the tech media pounces on the story. A near miss
If the xz backdoor had been successful however, then eventually every single machine running OpenSSH on a systemd-based Linux distribution could have been compromised at any time or place of the attacker's choosing. This was a bit of a running joke among vulnerability researchers: since finding a real bug in zlib is extraordinarily difficult, inserting one in the code base when the maintainer announced a new release was probably the path of least resistance. On Ubuntu 24.04 you can no longer find liblzma in the OpenSSH address space, on Android almost every process is constrained by a mix of SELinux and seccomp-bpf, and on recent Linux kernels we now have support for a promising technology called landlock that will allow even unprivileged apps to run in a sandbox.
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