Byron Gibson byrongibson

FAQ on the xz-utils backdoor (CVE-2024-3094)

This is a living document. Everything in this document is made in good faith of being accurate, but like I just said; we don't yet know everything about what's going on.

Background

On March 29th, 2024, a backdoor was discovered in xz-utils, a suite of software that

Anti-hype LLM reading list

Goals: Add links that are reasonable and good explanations of how stuff works. No hype and no vendor content if possible. Practical first-hand accounts of models in prod eagerly sought.

Foundational Concepts

Pre-Transformer Models

macOS Internals

Understand your Mac and iPhone more deeply by tracing the evolution of Mac OS X from prelease to Swift. John Siracusa delivers the details.

Starting Points

How to use this gist

You've got two main options:

Requirements

Encrypt everthing including /boot and /root
Enter password once
Support UEFI

Installation media setup

Download NixOS minimal iso and copy to USB stick. For example on Mac OSX

$ diskutil list
$ diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1 # Make sure you got right device

	mkfifo /tmp/gfifo

	./xdp-screen-cast-ffmpeg.py & # or run in another terminal
	# Note the gstreamer pipeline
	# 'pipewiresrc fd=%d path=%u ! videorate ! video/x-raw,framerate=60/1 ! videoconvert ! filesink location=/tmp/gfifo'
	# I specified a 60/1 frameerate. You can do other pre-processing here, or offload it to ffmpeg.

	# Encode the stream and pipe to netcat
	# note: must specify correct resolution here
	# we can now use h264_nvenc, mpegts, and anything else ffmpeg has

	#!/usr/bin/env bash

	#
	# NixOS install script synthesized from:
	#
	# - Erase Your Darlings (https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings)
	# - ZFS Datasets for NixOS (https://grahamc.com/blog/nixos-on-zfs)
	# - NixOS Manual (https://nixos.org/nixos/manual/)
	# - Original gist by @nuxeh (https://gist.github.com/nuxeh/35fb0eca2af4b305052ca11fe2521159)
	#

	// I'm tired of extensions that automatically:
	// - show welcome pages / walkthroughs
	// - show release notes
	// - send telemetry
	// - recommend things
	//
	// This disables all of that stuff.
	// If you have more config, leave a comment so I can add it!!

	{

	{ config, pkgs, lib, ... }:
	let
	cfg = config.services.btrbk;
	sshEnabled = cfg.sshAccess != [ ];
	serviceEnabled = cfg.instances != { };
	attr2Lines = attr:
	let
	pairs = lib.attrsets.mapAttrsToList (name: value: { inherit name value; }) attr;
	isSubsection = value:
	if builtins.isAttrs value then true

	# Edit this configuration file to define what should be installed on
	# your system. Help is available in the configuration.nix(5) man page
	# and in the NixOS manual (accessible by running ‘nixos-help’).

	{ config, pkgs, ... }:

	{

	################################################################################
	# System