alt Hacker NewsYikes, that vuln in apt is pretty bad! I think a lot of the newer wave of vulnerabilities being found generally seem to have a low likelihood of being reached, but this seems somewhat plausible? I'm assuming this would be done by compromising a mirror, in order to do the redirect?
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It's not 'Attack Vector: Network' in cvss, so it's probably scoring lower than a 7.
EDIT: With 'AV:Adjacent Network' and A 'User Interaction: Required' and max impact (High on Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability, assuming worst case), then it gets a score of 8.
The subjectives lower the severity to my eyes as well, including the use of HTTP mirrors (which is the default notwithstanding), and the attacker needing to be an existing mirror at the time of the announcement, which is already a vetted group (or be in the path between the user and the mirrors, umm that is quite possible though, but quite hard to target). And finally the window for the disclosure and attacks is almost null, someone needs to use apt to be vulnerable, but if they use apt, they are probably autoupdating apt itself, I wonder if a simple 'apt install thing' will trigger an apt upgrade, in order to patch those that are not running autoupgrades.
More likely just a man in the middle attack. Apt typically uses HTTP (no TLS) as the signatures give the security. But in this case it sounds like the vulnerability is that after a successful signature check the legit file can be overridden by the attacker through some HTTP shenanigans.