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.
Is BLOB an acronym?
Nope, but it has become a backronym https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_storage#Origins
Cool thanks :)
All my laziness about not checking it out has come to fruition. Now I simply don’t have to, because this is sketch as fuck until it is handled.
Thank you for sharing this. I remember using Ventoy quite often back when I was still on Windows. I’ll be sticking with the good old
ddcommand.I love double d
Good ol’ disk destroyer
Any alternatives to this tool? I’ve used it a lot lately because I was testing out live OSes before installing one to the hard drive, but otherwise I don’t need it on a daily basis.
but otherwise I don’t need it on a daily basis.
I’ll be real, this is part of why I didn’t understand Ventoy. I keep a bunch of large, fast thumbdrives around blank and available. When I need/want to put an OS on there, I do it when I need it, and then I’m always installing the most current version of the install. It takes under 5 minutes, at best.
I used to try to keep various installs on thumbdrives… but it would be two years down the line by the time I needed to use it again and by that time it’s literally pointless to be using two year old installation media.
Ventoy wasn’t a foolproof solution but it really did beat the hell out of using 6 different USB drives. Most USB “pen drives” don’t make labeling easy and without labeling I’m just plugging them in one by one till I find the one I want.
I remember various different concepts of USB flash drives with integrated LCDs that would display a label and the remaining capacity. Then they vanished and the only thing left were the Lexar Echo drives. Until a few years ago, when they have been pulled from the markets. Probably, because they didn’t work with the now default GPT and its many different partition types.
IODD makes some. I had the older HDD version that stopped working after it got dropped, so now I use this one:
https://www.iodd.shop/IODD-SSD-drive-with-mini-USB-30-with-secure-256-bit-encryption
When I was working in IT, this would have been a very useful tool for doing some on-site troubleshooting with various tools or for one-off reimaging machines that were missed during a big update or something. Instead, I had a bag of USB sticks with labels on them, which was annoying to use and to maintain.
Part of the point behind Ventoy is that you don’t need to prepare the USB to be bootable. You can just copy/paste the whole iso into Ventoy and it will be bootable. New release comes out? Just copy it onto your USB drive. Don’t even need to remove the old version of you don’t want to.
Makes things much easier in the tech world for having a single USB with 50+ bootable tools and installers on there like with MediCat (which uses Ventoy as a base).
Only thing I’ve had issues with booting from Ventoy is the ProxMox install iso. Everything else has worked first try.
As someone with few USBs available, Ventoy takes me 2 minutes to flash, several minutes to copy a set of ISOs, and then any time I need it, it takes 0 minutes to have a working USB with some arbitrary ISO. Sure, it’s not up to date, but I don’t need it to be if I need to recover an install or use some random tool.
I guess, you could buy a handful of USB sticks…
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”
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.
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.
God I hate people who use github comments for their own benefit. “Just fork it bro” is never helpful.
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.
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
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.
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’ve had too many issues with Ventoy that I’d rather just use fedora media writer or balenaetcher for when that doesn’t work. I mean honestly it’s a bit gimmicky, even if it’s a cool concept. I believe Glim and some other options exist too
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.
If you don’t like it,
don’t usefork Ventoy.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.
It’s a useful tool, but there is a security concern for anything not fully open source. You will have to weigh your risk factors, I doubt that it’s any problem for most consumers or distro hoppers.
Best to keep an eye in case any new contributers arrive suddenly…
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.
On the contrary: that just goes to show what a fucking catastrophe for software freedom “Secure[sic] Boot” is.
that’s only a few files out of the 153
It sounds to me as a documentation issue, as the next comment says, simply including a
wgetscript should solve this.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…
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.
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.
Time for a fork, then?
Wtf is ventoy and why is nobody explaining it
Wtf is a BLOB and why is nobody explaining it
Because you can look it up.
Binary data. In the case of lz it was a carefully “corrupted” archive.
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.
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
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!
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.
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 point there are source and build instructions in their respective folder.
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.
I firmly believe there are no backdoors or anything dodgy going on here
OK but that’s hardly reassuring.
Not suspicious at all.
