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

2024/04/13 by Mario Lins, René Mayrhofer, Lins, Mario +7 · 7 citations
Dentistry · #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #Dental Implant Techniques and Outcomes #FOS: Computer and information sciences

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2404.08987

openalex publication_date 2024/04/13 · openalex created_date 2024/04/17 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29

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 relevant stages of the attack path.

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