📰 The amazingly scary xz sshd backdoor, (Mon, Apr 1st)

Unless you took the whole weekend off, you must have seen by now that Andres Freund published an amazing discovery on Friday on the Openwall mailing list (https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/03/29/4).
The whole story around this is both fascinating and scary – and I'm sure will be told around numerous time, so in this diary I will put some technical things about the backdoor that I reversed for quite some time (and I have a feeling I could spend 2 more weeks on this).
There is also a nice gist by smx-smx here that gets updated regularly so keep an eye there as well.
The author(s) of the backdoor went a long way to make the backdoor look as innocent as possible. This is also why all the reversing effort is taking such a long(er) time. Let's take a look at couple of fascinating things in this backdoor.