CommunityNews

CommunityNews

A Study of Malware Prevention in Linux Distributions

A Study of Malware Prevention in Linux Distributions.
Malicious attacks on open source software packages are a growing concern. This concern morphed into a panic-inducing crisis after the revelation of the XZ Utils backdoor, which would have provided the attacker with, according to one observer, a “skeleton key” to the internet. This study therefore explores the challenges of preventing and detecting malware in Linux distribution package repositories. To do so, we ask two research questions: (1) What measures have Linux distributions implemented to counter malware, and how have maintainers experienced these efforts? (2) How effective are current malware detection tools at identifying malicious Linux packages? To answer these questions, we conduct interviews with maintainers at several major Linux distributions and introduce a Linux package malware benchmark dataset. Using this dataset, we evaluate the performance of six open source malware detection scanners. Distribution maintainers, according to the interviews, have mostly focused on reproducible builds to date. Our interviews identified only a single Linux distribution, Wolfi OS, that performs active malware scanning. Using this new benchmark dataset, the evaluation found that the performance of existing open-source malware scanners is underwhelming. Most studied tools excel at producing false positives but only infrequently detect true malware. Those that avoid high false positive rates often do so at the expense of a satisfactory true positive. Our findings provide insights into Linux distribution package repositories’ current practices for malware detection and demonstrate the current inadequacy of open-source tools designed to detect malicious Linux packages.

Read in full here:

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.

Where Next?

Popular General Dev topics Top

First poster: Maartz
This Keyboard Lets People Type So Fast It’s Banned From Typing Competitions. A new peripheral lets you keep typing without ever lifting ...
New
First poster: bot
MEMORANDUM FOR SENIOR PENTAGON LEADERSHIP COMMANDANT OF THE COAST GUARD COMMANDERS OF THE COMBATANT COMMANDS DEFENSE AGENCY AND DOD FIEL...
New
First poster: joeb
GitHub - crablang/crab: A community fork of a language named after a plant fungus. All of the memory-safe features you love, now with 100...
New
First poster: KnowledgeIsPower
Building a Slack/Discord alternative with Tauri/Rust linen <span class="hashtag-icon-placeholder"></span>blog. Introduction My name is K...
New
First poster: FatimaAdamu
Two US lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT. Law firm also penalised after chatbot invented six legal cases th...
New
New
First poster: dyowee
Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?. There are 35% fewer software developer job listings on Indeed today, than five yea...
New
First poster: chris.johan
Skype’s days appear to be numbered, as a hidden string in the latest Skype for Windows preview suggests Microsoft will shutter the servic...
New
First poster: joeb
The new frameworks will continue until morale improves.
/js
New
CommunityNews
Rendering Action Mailer emails with Phlex components and layouts: Clean, Composable, and Completely Ruby - Blog post by Camillo Visini
New

Other popular topics Top

AstonJ
A thread that every forum needs! Simply post a link to a track on YouTube (or SoundCloud or Vimeo amongst others!) on a separate line an...
New
DevotionGeo
I know that these benchmarks might not be the exact picture of real-world scenario, but still I expect a Rust web framework performing a ...
New
axelson
I’ve been really enjoying obsidian.md: It is very snappy (even though it is based on Electron). I love that it is all local by defaul...
New
New
AstonJ
Just done a fresh install of macOS Big Sur and on installing Erlang I am getting: asdf install erlang 23.1.2 Configure failed. checking ...
New
Margaret
Hello content creators! Happy new year. What tech topics do you think will be the focus of 2021? My vote for one topic is ethics in tech...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Learn different ways of writing concurrent code in Elixir and increase your application's performance, without sacrificing scalability or...
New
rustkas
Intensively researching Erlang books and additional resources on it, I have found that the topic of using Regular Expressions is either c...
New
foxtrottwist
A few weeks ago I started using Warp a terminal written in rust. Though in it’s current state of development there are a few caveats (tab...
New
AstonJ
Curious what kind of results others are getting, I think actually prefer the 7B model to the 32B model, not only is it faster but the qua...
New