I'm not pretending these will solve everything, but they should make attacks a little harder in future. (1) We should routinely delete autoconf-generated cruft from upstream projects and regenerate it in %prep. It is easier to study the real source rather than dig through the convoluted, generated shell script in an upstream './configure' looking for back doors. For most projects, just running "autoreconf -fiv" is enough. Yes, there are some projects that depend on a specific or old version of autoconf. We should fix those. But that doesn't need to delay us from using autoreconf on many projects today. In the xz case this wouldn't have been enough, it turns out we would also have to delete m4/build-to-host.m4, which then autoreconf regenerates. I don't fully understand why that is. (2) We should discourage gnulib as much as possible. In libvirt we took the decision a few years ago to remove gnulib. It's extremely convoluted and almost no one understands how it really works. It's written in obscure m4 macros and shell script. It's also not necessary for Linux since gnulib is mainly about porting to non-Linux platforms. There are better ways to do this. In the xz case it was a gnulib-derived script which was modified to do the initial injection (original: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gnulib.git;a=blob;f=m4/build-to-host.m4;h=f928e9ab403b3633e3d1d974abcf478e65d4b0aa;hb=HEAD). (3) We should have a "security path", like "critical path". sshd is linked to a lot of libraries: /lib64/libaudit.so.1 audit-libs /lib64/libc.so.6 glibc /lib64/libcap-ng.so.0 libcap-ng /lib64/libcap.so.2 libcap /lib64/libcom_err.so.2 libcom_err /lib64/libcrypt.so.2 libxcrypt /lib64/libcrypto.so.3 openssl-libs /lib64/libeconf.so.0 libeconf /lib64/libgcc_s.so.1 libgcc /lib64/libgssapi_krb5.so.2 krb5-libs /lib64/libk5crypto.so.3 krb5-libs /lib64/libkeyutils.so.1 keyutils-libs /lib64/libkrb5.so.3 krb5-libs /lib64/libkrb5support.so.0 krb5-libs /lib64/liblz4.so.1 lz4-libs /lib64/liblzma.so.5 xz-libs /lib64/libm.so.6 glibc /lib64/libpam.so.0 pam-libs /lib64/libpcre2-8.so.0 pcre2 /lib64/libresolv.so.2 glibc /lib64/libselinux.so.1 libselinux /lib64/libsystemd.so.0 systemd-libs /lib64/libz.so.1 zlib / zlib-ng /lib64/libzstd.so.1 zstd Should we have a higher level of attention to these packages? We already have "critical path", but that's a broad category now. These seem like they are "security path" packages, an intentionally small subset associated with very secure services which are enabled by default. These are just my thoughts on a Saturday morning. Feedback welcome of course. Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines. Tiny program with many powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc. http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top -- _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
