I had no idea this issue had been identified. While I find this tool very useful, the project is seeming rather questionable to me now.
I haven’t read to far into this but the issue is completely devoid of contributors and maintainers. I find the wording of the issue quite concerning:
Due to the recent XZ-Utils drama I checked the code and I’m appalled. There are more BLOBS than source code. https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/tree/3f65f0ef03e4aebcd14f233ca808a4f894657802/cryptsetup https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/tree/3f65f0ef03e4aebcd14f233ca808a4f894657802/Unix/ventoy_unix https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/tree/3f65f0ef03e4aebcd14f233ca808a4f894657802/DMSETUP
There is no reason to have those not be build in the release process. Of course it’s convenient, they are prebuild, it’s fast and nobody has a problem with it.
Recent events however showed that these BLOBs can contain everything and nothing. The build instructions would not produce the exact same executable for everyone. It’s better to have GitHub build it on-push and use them out of the build cache.
I would do it myself, but unfortunately I’m not familiar enough with the Ventoy build process to actually do it. I understand that removing BLOBs isn’t a priority over new and shiny features. But due to recent events, this should be rethought.
Thank you for reading this and I hope for a productive conversation
This is free software, they don’t owe you anything and this kind of language sounds angry and entitled. You can’t just Gordon Ramsay on someone else’s codebase.
What does BLOB stand for?
Binary Large OBject
Anyone who wants to fix this can help fix it, but people are just making demands of an unpaid maintainer. The devs can run this project the way they want to. If you don’t like it, don’t use Ventoy.
The people comparing this to the xz exploit are out of line. xz was a library that was deeply embedded in a lot of software. Ventoy is an IT tool used to boot live OSes. Not even remotely the same attack surface.
Blobs in the source tree are not ideal, but people need to pick their battles.
From what others have said: The blobs violate GPL because they are taken from other FOSS project but the changes Ventoy makes are not viewable.
As a wise one once said: “Talk is cheap, send patches”
Little did they know that Patches the Cat bit through their LAN lines and actually increased the cost of their communication.
Glad it’s getting a little more light. Been trying to tell people this for a few years now lol. It’s the reason I’ve stayed away from it since first learning of the tool and looking at the “source code”.
I was bored at work one day. I decided to put a nyan cat easter egg in my company’s app. If at the loading progress bar screen you typed NYAN it would turn the progress bar into a rainbow being created by a little nyan cat while playing the nyan cat song. The mp3 (inconspicuously renamed without the extension) doubled our build size. No one batted an eye cause no one paid attention to the build size much.
Fast forward 5 years later, at a different job, I get a phone call from the old boss. Do you happen to know anything about this nyan cat file we found?
I had no idea what he was talking about.
Years and years ago I worked on a project where the logo was the outline of a head and an inward swirl for the brain.
For the website, if you held your mouse over it for 9 seconds, it would spin and flush. No one ever found that one that I know of.
Should’ve included that in your FE analytics.
Aaaand thats why all commits should be signed with your pgp key
It sounds like they weren’t using any form of version control, so that’s definitely on them at this point
What makes you say that? To me, it sounds like that’s what they do have cause they tracked the change back to him. The commit message obviously said nothing about the file.
Ah I could see that. I took it as them not knowing where the file came from at all, so they’re just asking all the devs who would have had access at that point, which is why it was “hey do you know anything about this file?” and not “is there a specific reason you committed this file to the build?”
You think they’d call up devs who left them just to ask if they happen to know about a random file?
10/10
That story was a journey.
Wtf is ventoy and why is nobody explaining it
because search engines exist
Wtf is search engines and why is no one explaining it
Search engines are websites that people used to go to in order to get helpful information. These days, they just spam out a bunch of SEO garbage, AI-generated bullshit, and ads.
Google, probably
shh…it’s a spyware and adware!
Wtf is a BLOB and why is nobody explaining it
Because you can look it up.
Binary Large OBject
Basically any binary file, often objected to in open source repos because of the lack of source and ‘openness’. See also the recent xz backdoor.
Binary data. In the case of lz it was a carefully “corrupted” archive.
Basically an OS which let’s you choose another OS to boot into. This way you can chose between multiple OS’s on one USB drive. You drag your ISO files into a USB folder and choose between them on boot.
That sounded like grub until you said ISO file
Yeah basically grub but on a USB stick and with ISO files
So like rEFInd but on the same drive?
I used Ventoy (its still on my USB stick). Its actually a pretty cool concept. Normally without Ventoy, you would flash your Linux distribution on the USB stick. And then you can boot from it, right?
Ventoy instead allows you to have a folder where you put an ISO without flashing it, and then you can boot from it by selecting in the menu. You just need to flash Ventoy once, as the base system, then you can put as many ISO files into that directory. I tested it and have 7 different Linux distributions (ranging from 1 GB to 4 GB variants) on the same USB stick, and I can boot any of them without flashing again. Replacing ISO is extremely easy, just delete it and copy a new one. Filenames does not matter, anything can be found.
I like multiboot. Used it back when I used Windows.
The Ventoy advertisements on Reddit looked too suspicious, so I never checked it out.After I saw that issue, I attempted to build Ventoy from source. After making numerous modifications and getting only the first couple components built, I got tired of it and quit. I’ve made some modifications to glim and use that instead, although it’s still not as easy as Ventoy. But I don’t trust Ventoy if I can’t build it myself.
Further, when @vkc@linuxmom.net made some criticisms of Ventoy in one of her YouTube videos, she was subjected to a harassment campaign, and others told her the same happened to them. That pushed me from not trusting Ventoy to actively distrusting it.
I remember this thread! Before I saw this comment, I had already gone to look it up again:
Here’s the initial post of Verionica’s video on booting from ISO files: https://linuxmom.net/@vkc/112905487325961707
And here’s the post on 'The Ventoy conspiracy": https://linuxmom.net/@vkc/112906968594601449Further, when @vkc@linuxmom.net made some criticisms of Ventoy in one of her YouTube videos, she was subjected to a harassment campaign, and others told her the same happened to them.
What the fuck is happening to the world? Are we regressing or were we always this regressed and we’ve just given powerful tools to fucking chowderheads?
There’s a subset of the Linux/FOSS/etc. community who are Conservative, misogynistic, racist, and/or otherwise general bigots. Compare the Ventoy-bros against the Elon-bros, and you’ll see a similar pattern of behavior.
I don’t personally understand it, since development is still sometimes seen as “work for weirdo nerds,” so you’d think they would understand what it feels like to be rejected or bullied, but here we are. They manage to stay under the radar, because there’s usually no reason to discuss politics or philosophy when you’re debugging code.
There’s a subset of the Linux/FOSS/etc. community who are Conservative, misogynistic, racist, and/or otherwise general bigots.
right, the hackernews set…
Don’t know why you’re being downvoted, hackernews is an awful site of smug, dumb software “engineer” tech bros with some of the worst takes on anything that isn’t explicitly about how to code
It’s the other way around I think. We are progressing. More voices are heard which “should” be a good thing. Right? Right…?
/s
I too wish the developer would respond, but I don’t think this is the catastrophe people are making it out to be. One comment seems to explain why these binaries are included:
Because ventoy supports shim, and by extension secure boot, these files needs to come from a signed Linux distro. In this case they are taken from Fedora releases, and OpenSUSE apparently, as they publish shim binaries and grub binaries signed by their certificate.
If the hashes match the files from the Fedora or OpenSUSE releases, then does this really matter?
It matters because nobody is going to check the hashes for all of the files match whenever there’s a change so the maintainer can just replace them with whatever he wants.
that’s what automation is for - nobody is going to manually check them, but anyone is able to automatically set something up to check their hashes in change… the fact that it’s possible that anyone is doing that now that it’s a known issue perhaps makes it less problematic as an attack vector
That is true, but also nobody is doing it. Just like nobody is verifying Signal’s “reproducible builds”.
are you sure?
there could be thousands just waiting for a failure to come out and say “HEY THIS IS DODGY”
Is that any different from no one checking the code every update?
The amount of malware you can cram in a source-code patch without drawing attention vs. in a binary is vastly different.
There’s also the fact that if you want to ship binaries, you can just wget them from source during the build process. Not a perfect solution but much better than what’s ventoy doing. The source code updates works the same in every project because it has to. That’s why this is drawing more attention.
That’s ok if we are talking about malware publicly shown in the published source code… but there’s also the possibility of a private source-code patch with malware that it’s secretly being applied when building the binaries for distribution. Having clean source code in the repo is not a guarantee that the source code is the same that was used to produce the binaries.
This is why it’s important for builds to be reproducible, any third party should be able to build their own binary from clean source code and be able to obtain the exact same binary with the same hash. If the hashes match, then you have a proof of the binary being clean. You have this same problem with every single binary distribution, even the ones that don’t include pre-compiled binaries in their repo.
On the contrary: that just goes to show what a fucking catastrophe for software freedom “Secure[sic] Boot” is.
While this is true, it only requires the shim and grub to be copied for another distro.
From other comments there are a lot more blobs than just these two.
It sounds like most, if not all, come from upstream projects.
Would be nice if the dev can respond and confirm that…
It sounds to me as a documentation issue, as the next comment says, simply including a
wgetscript should solve this.that’s only a few files out of the 153
153 binaries? where?
Hey guys open source is great you can look at all the code and therefore there are no security backdoors etc. Also here are a bunch of pre-compiled blobs in the repo, don’t worry about those, but they are required to run the program.
The fact that people know there are pre-compiled blobs in open source means they have an informed reason to avoid the software!
Right, the fact that it’s open is the reason this came to light, and we’re having this discussion
Exactly. Acting like this is an “ah-ha, see?!!” moment when this is exactly what open source is designed for. That’s like saying global warming is a hoax because “oh look it’s snowing”.
Well, it is an “ah-ha, see!” moment, because it shows the benefit of open source.
Its more like pointing at the absence of a glacier on a mountaintop and saying “yep, see, climate change does exist”
I was referring to the commenter and how it read to me :) But agreed, what you said, too.
This isn’t a knock against opensource programming, but there shouldn’t ever be precompiled blobs in the repo unless they are the official builds for the various OS’s and if you want to build from source, the pre-compiled blobs shouldn’t be part of that, otherwise you can’t really claim you are opensource.
Yes, and that’s what is being called out here. But your original comment makes it sound like you are advocating for closed source software and that somehow open source software is bad.
This is the system working as intended. When potential issues arise, it’s openly discussed and ideally resolved. And if not, trust is lost and people will stop using it.
I don’t know about the history of the project, but it sounds like those blobs have been there for quite some time. When in reality, the PR that added the blobs in the first place shouldn’t ever have been approved.
Actually just checked 3+ years.
Time for a fork, then?
This is a bit absurd. I really don’t think this is as serious as some comments say. Also there is a comment from AUR package manager which explains more details. . And even the blobs in the first post there are source and build instructions in their respective folder.
I firmly believe there are no backdoors or anything dodgy going on here
OK but that’s hardly reassuring.
Not suspicious at all.
And even the blobs in the first point there are source and build instructions in their respective folder.
No it is not. It is supposedly the built result based on the instruction provided. If they can just provide that instruction, why not provide the source as well?
The issue thread also highlights the stubbornness and hostility of the project maintainer toward possible contributors.
That linked reply doesn’t explain anything. It just says “bro trust him”. Just because you and the AUR maintainer says its trustful, does not make it clear whats behind the binary blobs. It doesn’t matter what anyone says, if we can’t verify. In my opinion, its absurd calling others absurd for not trusting the word of others.
Makes me wonder how far the closest alternative, glim, could be upgraded to match Ventoy given the confines of GRUB.
Someone had mentioned that Fedora fails to verify when booting from Ventoy. Now I’m thinking if I could dd the media loaded via Ventoy and compare with an original copy to see what changed.
God I hate people who use github comments for their own benefit. “Just fork it bro” is never helpful.
I agree that comments like that are unhelpful/unnecessary, but how is that “for their own benefit”? Other than the actual devs themselves using that as a way to just ignore issues, I do not follow
It makes them feel good and devalues the quality of discussion. Benefits them, harms others.
For me the problem is more in GPL violation: they distribute blobs under GPL3, user made a request of the source code by creating an issue, but they ignored that request. It is not only about “you have to fix it” versus “just fork it” imo.
Licence doesn’t apply to the creator.
He already owns the copyright, he doesn’t need a licence, he doesn’t need to adhere to the gpl
The binaries in question are various GNU and FOSS tools from elsewhere, not part of the Ventoy project itself. So no, the Ventoy author does not own the copyright of the tools in question.
Seriously this. Any comment about a complicated system that starts with “just” can be ignored 99% of the time.
Also, there are 4k forks of Ventoy already. Obviously forking it isn’t helping. Actual work needs to be done.
