On 2016-03-22 09:48, Vladimir Prus wrote:
On 3/21/2016 9:15 PM, Michael Witten wrote:
In any case, something must be done; this project sits at the core of much critical software, and its integrity should be ensured with greater zeal.
That's true, but it's not clear whether tampered source archives is the biggest risk. If you look at other open-source projects, all the huge security problems were either genuine bugs, or government-mandated "export crypto", not so much of directly evil code. If one wanted to use Boost as attack vector, he'd probably try to introduce buffer overflow inside otherwise reasonable patch, for which the above solutions would not help.
Just recently Transmission (a bittorrent client) packages were tampered with on its official website, so that the packages include malware that encrypts user's data for ransom [1]. I mean, it's just an example, and likely not the only one, of what can happen if the distributed packages are not protected enough. [1] https://www.transmissionbt.com/