On the critical path to implant backdoors and the effectiveness of potential mitigation techniques: Early learnings from XZ

arXiv:2404.08987v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: An emerging supply-chain attack due to a backdoor in XZ Utils has been identified. The backdoor allows an attacker to run commands remotely on vulnerable servers utilizing SSH without prior authentication. We have started to collect available information with regards to this attack to discuss current mitigation strategies for such kinds of supply-chain attacks. This paper introduces the critical attack path of the XZ backdoor and provides an overview about potential mitigation techniques related to …

arxiv attack attacker authentication backdoor backdoors collect critical cs.cr emerging implant mitigation path run servers ssh supply techniques vulnerable xz utils