Comment by g-b-r
20 hours ago
It's largely the same for all automatic updating systems that don't protect against personalized updates.
I don't know the status of the updating systems of the various distributions; if some use server-delivered scripts run as root, that's potentially a further powerful attack avenue.
But I was assuming that the update process itself is safe; the problem is that you usually don't have guarantees that the updates you get are genuine.
So if you update a component run as root, yes, the update could include malicious code that can do anything.
But even an update to a very constrained application could be very damaging: for example, if it is for a E2EE messaging application, it could modify it to have it send each encryption key to a law enforcement agency.
> the problem is that you usually don't have guarantees that the updates you get are genuine
A point of order: you do have that guarantee for most Linux distro packages. All 70,000 of them in Debian's case. And all Linux distro distribute their packages anonymously, so they can never target just one individual.
That's primarily because they aren't trying to make money out of you. Making money requires a billing relationship, and tracking which of your customers own what. Off the back of that governments can demand particular users are targeted with "special" updates. Australia in particular demands commercial providers do that with its "Assistance and Access Bill (2018)" and I'm sure most governments in the OECD have equivalents.
> so they can never target just one individual
You assume the binary can't just have a machine check in itself that activates only on the target's computer.