Frequently Asked Questions about CVE-2024-3094, a backdoor in XZ tools

On March 29, a post on the Open Source Security Mailing List warned of a compromised software package, XZ Utils. The malicious code can be used by any software linked to the XZ library and allow for the interception and modification of data used with the library. In the example observed by Andres Freund, who discovered this backdoor, under certain conditions this malicious code could allow an actor to “break sshd authentication” and gain access to an affected system. As this is a developing story, Tenable Research has put together a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) blog post for CVE-2024-3094, a backdoor in XZ Utils.