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posted by Fnord666 on Friday February 05 2021, @03:23AM   Printer-friendly
from the we-don't-trust-m$ dept.

Several sites are covering an incident affecting Raspberry Pi OS deployments since last week. Quietly, without disclosure or warning, a package added a Microsoft repository and OpenPGP key to the system. The latter effectively gives the former full root access, in principle, to the whole system. The former checks in with Microsoft's servers any time APT refreshes its cache.

$ grep -i pretty /etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux 10 (buster)"

How to know if you're affected/infected already:

$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vscode.list
### THIS FILE IS AUTOMATICALLY CONFIGURED ###
# You may comment out this entry, but any other modifications may be lost.
deb [arch=amd64,arm64,armhf] http://packages.microsoft.com/repos/code
stable main

Issue has been taken with both what has been done and how it has been deployed. The official explanation is, for now, that resource hog Visual Studio was to be made available by default on the Raspberry Pi for development for their first entry into microcontrollers, the Raspberry Pi Pico. This is in spite of the established presence of many light weight editors and IDEs alredy[sic] available through vetted repositories. Not to mention the package could have been added to the established, vetted repositories. Threads on the topic over at the Raspberry Pi Forum are quickly locked by moderators and then deleted.


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 05 2021, @07:51PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 05 2021, @07:51PM (#1109393)

    It would be nice to see some of the hardware vendors come out and chat about all this.

    If your a foss project, you really should have anti-eee clauses in your corporate charter, and there needs to be a registry of projects that are so configured. Maybe a next project for Stallman?

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