Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/969908/

The recent XZ backdoor has sparked a lot of discussion about how the open-source
community links and packages software. One possible
security improvement being discussed
is changing how
projects like systemd link to dynamic libraries that are only used for
optional functionality: using

dlopen() to load those libraries only
when required. This could
shrink the attack surface exposed by dependencies, but the approach is not
without downsides — most prominently, it makes discovering which dynamic
libraries a program depends on harder.
On April 11, Lennart Poettering proposed one way to eliminate that problem

in a systemd RFC on GitHub.