Xz/liblzma: Bash-stage Obfuscation Explained

• SQLAlchemy

  126 8,916 9.7 Python

  The Database Toolkit for Python

  

OK -

can we start considering binary files committed to a repo, even as data for tests, to be a huge red flag, and that the binary files themselves should instead be generated at testing time by source code that's stated as reviewable cleartext. This would make it much harder (though of course we can never really say "impossible") to embed a substantial payload in this way.

when binary files are part of a test suite, they are typically trying to illustrate some element of the program being tested, in this case a file that was incorrectly xz-encoded. Binary files like these weren't typed by hand, they will always ultimately come from something plaintext source.

Here's an example! My own SQLAlchemy repository has a few binary files in it! https://github.com/sqlalchemy/sqlalchemy/blob/main/test/bina... oh noes. Why are those files there? well in this case I just wanted to test that I can send large binary BLOBs into the database driver and I was lazy. This is actually pretty dumb, the two binary files here add 35K of useless crap to the source, and I could just as easily generate this binary data on the fly using a two liner that spits out random bytes. Anyone could see that two liner and know that it isn't embedding a malicious payload.

If I wanted to generate a poorly formed .xz file, I'd illustrate source code that generates random data, runs it through .xz, then applies "corruption" to it, like zeroing out the high bit of every byte. The process by which this occurs would be all reviewable in source code.

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