Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

NSA Linux In Depth

Posted by Hemos on from the taking-a-look-inside dept.

deran9ed writes "Folks over at IBM have an article explaining the intricacies regarding the NSA's SE Linux distribution. Included in the article, are the inner workings of the operating system. its features, design architecture. Definitely a nice article for Linux users (especially SE Linux users). Full The review is in IBM DeveloperWorks."

4 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Backdoor challenge for you hackers... by trog · · Score: 5

    I would think that the best way to hide an "Easter Egg" in openly available code would be not to attempt to hide it at all.

    Just because the source is available, doesn't mean that people will examine it, nor does it mean that the people who do examine it are competent to do so. A good example of this is the OpenBSD team. Many people trust that OpenBSD has been audited. Can anyone here give one good reason why this auditing should be trusted, or what qualifies the OpenBSD team to audit the code? Even with the auditing, security compromises have been found in the audited OpenBSD code, as recently as late last year.

    This is even more true the larger the system gets. For example, how many people in the world understand, line by line, exactly how the entire linux kernel operates? Even Linus himself doesn't; he delegates code he doesn't find interesting (or doesn't have the time or ability to work on) to other people.

    Besides, there are far, far more effective ways to compromise information than a direct technology attack. Sideband attacks, social engineering, tempest readings, bribery, etc. I am of the opinion that the reason the NSA are not as up in arms as they used to be about encryption is that they have other means of obtaining that same information.

  2. Missing the point by GrEp · · Score: 5

    I think some here are missing the point. The NSA's mission is to stop terrorists/druglords etc.

    They also charged with stoping computer terrorism.

    Instead of just trying to intercept the information trail, they are stoping the problem at its source: bad security. By encouraging corperations and govt agenceys to have better security they are saving themselves the headache of tracking down the bad guys that exploit security holes.

    --

    bash-2.04$
    bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
  3. Two headed beast by rgmoore · · Score: 5

    You're missing two points. The simpler one is that NSA SE Linux is not really about encryption at all; it's about adding mandatory access controls to the system. IOW it's about making the box more secure to attempts to crack it, but has nothing to do with the security of data that's transmitted from the box to the rest of the world. That means that so long as NSA can gather and decrypt the other guys' transmissions, it doesn't matter how resistant their boxen are to being cracked.

    The other thing to consider is that NSA really has two missions. One is the one that everyone pays attention to- signals intelligence. The other mission is to help American institutions develop more secure computing systems so that our data is protected, and that's the group that's involved in SE Linux. The two pieces may be nominally part of the same organization, but their structures and goals are very different. The SIGINT branch is very secretive and wishes that nobody knew that they exist. The secure computing part by definition has to evangelize and make its developments as widespread as possible in order to make sure that everyone who's supposed to be protected is protected. With an organization that schizophrenic, you shouldn't be surprised to see something like this occasionally.

    --

    There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.

  4. Backdoor challenge for you hackers... by clary · · Score: 5
    Sure you can look at this post and claim its a conspiracy of some sort to point out these findings, but lets take a look at how many 1k bytes of code could be inserted throughout the SE Linux OS to have them somewhere down the line be combined in order for the NSA to open a backdoor of some sort.
    It seems to me that this would be double-damned hard in an open source system. I was just going to flame you as promoting an inferior conspiracy theory...but instead...

    How would all you clever hackers out there hide a function in an open source system in a way that it can escape detection even if all the source is read? (Let's call the function an Easter Egg, rather than a back door, because I don't want to encourage anything evil. ;-)

    I started down a couple of thought paths, and stopped because they both sounded lame to me. I keep coming up against the problem of getting the source to encode something fishy, without having it smell! Obfuscation is problemmatic, because in my mind it would raise red flags, especially in NSA code.

    --

    "Rub her feet." -- L.L.