TL;DR there was a backdoor found in the XZ program. All major distros have been updated but it is recommended that you do a fresh install on systems that are exposed to the internet and that had the bad version of the program. Only upstream distros were affected.
stable release of Arch Linux is also affected. That distribution, however, isn’t used in production systems.
Don’t tell me how to live my life, Ars Technica.
I am not deep enough in it, but from the arch-announce mailinglist:
From the upstream report [1]:
openssh does not directly use liblzma. However debian and several other distributions patch openssh to support systemd notification, and libsystemd does depend on lzma.
Arch does not directly link openssh to liblzma, and thus this attack vector is not possible. You can confirm this by issuing the following command:
$(command -v sshd)
However, out of an abundance of caution, we advise users to remove the malicious code from their system by upgrading either way. This is because other yet-to-be discovered methods to exploit the backdoor could exist.
Meanwhile non SystemD systems like NetBSD FreeBSD OpenBSD are safer.
