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0 pointsgeofft7y ago0 comments

That perception is correct. It's limited because in practice Debian developers (being almost entirely volunteers!) don't have the resources to read and audit each line in an upstream release, so certainly intentionally obfuscated backdoors from a previously trustworthy upstream would almost certainly get through. But the type of attack in this article, with a new binary and an unwanted line of shell script to run it, would be very unlikely to get through.

There's also a limited set of people who can upload new packages and a separate team that reviews those, so duplicated functionality / low-quality apps are unlikely to make it into the archive in the first place. Yet Another 2048 Clone would probably not be allowed in unless it was part of e.g. an official GNOME game set.

It also helps that Debian insists on recompiling everything from source and does not redistribute binaries from an upstream source, even if freely-licensed source code is provided.

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im3w1l7y ago

Thanks a lot for clarifying these things. Do they do any identity verification so people can be held accountable after the fact if something shady were to be discovered?

jlgaddis7y ago

Yes.

> All work in Debian is performed by developers that can be identified. For those using Debian to be able to trust Debian, we feel it is important that our users can identify those that are working on the project and that development is as transparent as is possible. [0]

I don't personally use Debian very much these days -- my desktops all run Fedora, my servers (with a few exceptions) run CentOS and RHEL -- but I used Debian exclusively for many, many years and out of all Linux distributions Debian (IMO, of course) comes the closest to doing things "the right way". In and of itself, that is pretty amazing, I think, considering that there isn't really all that much that has changed in its 25 year history! In other words, they somehow managed to get things right the first time around.

There are a few things that could perhaps be done a little better or different but -- considering that Debian is an all-volunteer project -- I think they manage to do an awesome job with the limited resources available to them.

[0]: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianKeyring

geofftOP7y ago

Yes, that's part of why Debian uses PGP keys for package uploads and insists that your key is signed by other Debian developers and not simply anyone in the web of trust. (I am aware of one Debian developer who contributes / is known to the community by a pseudonym, but I'm told that a few other senior people in Debian know this person's legal name for this exact reason.)

throwaway083207y ago

While full auditing is impossible for any distribution, Debian has a multiple people eyeballing code.

Apart the package maintainers and contributors, the Security Team can also review critical packages and step in if something looks suspicious.

But, most importantly, the release cycle and the long freeze before releases is all about STABILITY and SECURITY.

Anybody can upload backdoored code on npm/PyPI etc, infect someone and then remove the malicious release without being detected.

Releasing something malicious or with serious bugs before a freeze cycle and going undetected for months is not impossible but much more difficult.

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