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Notes -
I think "depended" here, while true in certain technical sense (as "being on the list of libraries the code is compiled with") in broader sense it is actually the main reason that enabled this failure. There's no technological reason for per se for SSH to use "xz", as far as I can see, it was merely added to make it work with another component. And while SSH, being sensitive component and a primary gateway to most systems, is scrutinized thoroughly, the dependencies may be softer. There's also no good technological reason why systemd needs xz and why it doesn't do whatever it needs to do with xz in a separate component isolated from the component that is needed for interacting with SSH. This is just lack of foresight, laziness and preferring convenience to security. I am not saying it is some outstanding failure - I probably have done decisions like that numerous times, knowingly or unknowingly, over the years of my own career. This particular one led to a very significant breach, and if people were more austere and security-minded in their designs, this likely wouldn't happen - but most people aren't. But I feel like the picture at xkcd, while being both hilarious and true, is not reflecting this particular case entirely accurately - neither systemd not SSH weren't destined to fail that way by any good technical reason, and probably nothing would happen to them - except for tiny amount of inconvenience for a tiny number of people - if these dependencies were removed.
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