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.

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 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.

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.

God I hate people who use github comments for their own benefit. "Just fork it bro" is never helpful.

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".

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.

As a wise one once said: "Talk is cheap, send patches"

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.

Wtf is ventoy and why is nobody explaining it

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.

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.

I never trusted it because I thought it was completely proprietary. Well now I know it basically is.

Time for a fork, then?