Ventoy is a tool to make a USB with multiple ISOs bootable, letting you select which ISO to use on boot. Another newly-created account claims to be the dev’s friend and translator and has received no contact from the maintainer.
I understand the concern raised, but unless I’m reading this wrong there is an assumption that Ventoy may be doing something untoward, but I’m not sure how at this level. It can’t inject anything into the ISO files at rest without bricking then, and I don’t know if an OS that doesn’t verify it’s own image before booting.
Just sounds like super lazy project administration. Maybe I’m missing something?
It can’t inject anything into the ISO files at rest without bricking then, and I don’t know if an OS that doesn’t verify it’s own image before booting.
As far as I can tell, this is not talking about ISOs installed using Ventoy, but precompiled blobs of things like Busybox that are included in the Ventoy install package. It’s an important distinction. The developer could bundle a tampered blob, include in the documentation the checksum that matches that blob, and then if someone checks with the upstream project and calls them out, say something along the lines of, “Oh, they must have withdrawn that release,” and replace it with an untampered blob. If they don’t fight to preserve the tampered blob, they might even get away with it.
The claim of the person you’re replying to is that even if the binaries were tampered, Ventoy wouldn’t be able to do anything.
Even if the original issue had anything to do with ISOs, he’s way overestimating the level of protection on many install ISOs, in my experience—they’re just disk images, and presumably all the files read off them are passing through Ventoy itself. Even if you find one that performs some kind of verification, easy enough to change a jump instruction to a no-op somewhere in the machine code guts of a file as it passes through Ventoy, and prevent the verification from executing. (The difficult part is figuring out which instruction to change, but people have done it before.)
- Around April, there was this big thing where a maintainer for XZ Compression included an SSH backdoor in binaries that were only built on release. If a freaking piece of compression software can backdoor SSH, who knows what else is possible.
- The response to the blob concern is nonsensical, made without their previously-known accounts, and coincides with someone’s claim that they are a close friend and was on vacation to China, the country where the XZ maintainer was from.
The xz issue is something totally different though. That was a software library running and executing against flat files. I’m just not sure there’s a way to alter an ISO image before boot, undetected in the case of Ventoy.
If the goal is to alter files to provide access to something, this must be some sort of ingenious way that bypasses checksums, and targets something universal, which doesn’t seem quite possible in the case of a substitute bootloader.
