Security News > 2024 > March > Red Hat warns of backdoor in XZ tools used by most Linux distros
Today, Red Hat warned users to immediately stop using systems running Fedora development versions because of a backdoor found in the latest XZ Utils data compression tools and libraries.
"No versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux are affected. We have reports and evidence of the injections successfully building in xz 5.6.x versions built for Debian unstable."
Red Hat is now tracking this supply chain security vulnerability as CVE-2024-3094, assigned it a 10/10 critical severity score, and reverted to 5.4.x versions of XZ in Fedora 40 beta.
"The resulting malicious build interferes with authentication in sshd via systemd. SSH is a commonly used protocol for connecting remotely to systems, and sshd is the service that allows access," Red Hat said.
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Related Vulnerability
| DATE | CVE | VULNERABILITY TITLE | RISK |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-03-29 | CVE-2024-3094 | Unspecified vulnerability in Tukaani XZ 5.6.0/5.6.1 Malicious code was discovered in the upstream tarballs of xz, starting with version 5.6.0. | 10.0 |