#Ventoy Security Concerns (please boost for visibility)

Ventoy is a popular utility for making USB drives containing multiple operating systems in the form of bootable image files. While very useful in theory, the source tree contains numerous binary blobs without source code. This issue has been brought up to the authors multiple times, have not been corrected, and have even gotten worse (more blobs have been added to the code over time). This is a potential malware vector, similar to the "test files" in the xz-utils backdoor catastrophe.

Recently the author has ignored a very lengthy thread raising security concerns because of these binary blobs. Given the amount of attention the thread has gotten, this seems strange, especially given that the authors have been active since then. https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/issues/2795

Stranger yet still, a video by Veronica Explains (@vkc) on how to create bootable USB flash drives got flooded by comments heavily suggesting the use of Ventoy and even being somewhat accusing because Veronica didn't advertise Ventoy. This is... not anything I've seen users of ANY open-source project do, and it feels similar to the social engineering done against Lasse Collin that convinced him to add Jia Tan as a maintainer, thus compromising xz-utils. See the comments of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiSXClZauXA&t=3s

If you're using Ventoy, you may want to consider ceasing its use for the time being out of an abundance of caution. If you truly need its functionality, you might look into something like the IODD SSD Enclosure (https://www.iodd.shop/HDD/SSD-Enclosure) which can emulate an optical drive and allows you to select an ISO saved to the drive to boot from.

#linux #boot #security #malicious #backdoor