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Schwartz Comments On NSA/Sun OpenSolaris Collaboration
sean_nestor writes to mention that Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz took a bit of time recently to comment on last week's announcement that Sun Microsystems would be partnering closely with the NSA for security research surrounding OpenSolaris. Rather than the typical loads of legalese and confidentiality agreements Sun and the NSA are claiming that this move is more about the NSA joining the OpenSolaris community than anything else. I guess only time will tell.
"Open" is the keyword here. It's not like they are going to be submitting binary patches or that we can't review the source code they submit.
I'd also like to point out the SELinux project, will you abandon Linux now too?
You should really adjust that tin foil, it's messing with the signals that are already inside your head.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
It takes me forever to pull out SELinux when I deploy a new Linux server and now I have to worry about what the hell OpenSolaris is doing instead of running an application or whatever its purpose is supposed to be doing.
Doesn't anyone else see MAJOR privacy and 4th amendment violations when government and business get into bed with each other?!?! I do not want any agency in the US government helping Sun, Microsoft, and or anyone else with "securing" their products. There is only one reason why the NSA is interested in OpenSolaris and it has nothing to do with "securing" it.
Helping a Vole out of a hole
By Nick Farrell: Tuesday, 09 January 2007, 2:26 PM
THE USA GOVERNMENT'S cryptologic organisation, the National Security Agency, has admitted that it is behind some of the security changes to Microsoft's operating system Vista.
According to the Washington Post, the agency which was once so secret that it was jokingly referred to as 'No such Agency' has admitted making 'unspecified contributions' to Vista.
Tony Sager, the NSA's chief of vulnerability analysis and operations group, told the Post that it was the agency's intention to help everyone these days.
The NSA used a red and a blue team to pull apart the software. The red team posed as "the determined, technically competent adversary" to disrupt, corrupt or steal information. The Blue team helped Defense Department system administrators with Vista's configuration.
Vole said that it has sought help from the NSA over the last four years. Apparently its skills can be seen in the Windows XP consumer version and the Windows Server 2003 for corporate customers.
The assistance is at the US taxpayers' expense, although the NSA says it all makes perfect sense. Not only is the NSA protecting United States business, its own Defense Department uses VoleWare so it is in the government's interest to make sure it is as secure as possible.
Microsoft is not the only one to tap the spooks. Apple, with its Mac OSX operating system, and Novell with its SUSE Linux also asked the NSA what it thought of their products. The NSA is quite good at finding weapons of mass destruction that are not there.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
On the NSA side, having many eyes analyzing their code has both risks -- if holes are found in their security model or implementations, potentially these could be exploited by the blackhat types and benefits -- more weaknesses discovered faster and holes plugged so that the blackhat types get closed out of NSA type stuff faster than they can do it with closed implementations.
But neither of these scenarios will let NSA somehow increase their "big brother reach" because with many eyes comes near perfect scrutiny that would quickly out any code back-doors, etc. that would be usable by the white hats or the black hats.
On the whole I find this to be a cool/worthwhile endeavor on Sun's part and look forward to it's efforts being leveraged into all of the Open Source stuff that can use it.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
I suspect what really is going on is that the NSA doesn't trust closed Microsoft code and wants to make sure there are secure open source operating systems they can use (they may get access to the MS codebase, but I doubt they'd be able to set up their own secure repository and verified build).
Remember, sane people mistrust the NSA. Paranoid people work for the NSA.
Spoken like a conspiracy theory nut. Distrust of the government is a very good thing. Blindingly thinking the government is out to get you is as stupid as blindingly believing it's out to help you. In this case, SELinux is completely open and out there for you to see.
It takes teams of people to understand the ins and outs of large sums of source codeDo you think teams of people haven't gone through the SELinux code with a fine-tooth comb? Security researchers were all over that, when the code was first given to the community in 2000. It wasn't placed in the mainline kernel until 2003. There has been plenty of time for people to find echelon-type code in there. Not to mention it would be pretty stupid to put that type of code in the open, as it would destroy people's confidence in the NSA and allow people who looked at the code to use these hooks for their own benefits, thus potentially using it against the US Government itself, since several departments including the DoD and the NSA itself use it.
I have hacked the kernel and made changes but I do not understand the entire thing, not one person could build an OS like Linux and deploy it without community support.No, but I guarantee you that if you submitted your kernel changes to the mainline tree, several people above you looked at those changes and vetted it as worthwhile for inclusion. And you can bet every one of those people don't understand the entire kernel, but sure as hell understood the part of the kernel you were messing with. And they understood what your code was doing. Anyone can make changes to the linux code, but it's not an open source repository that everyone submits to, there are specific processes to get things accepted to the main tree.
The government is like a sexually transmitted disease, easy to catch and hard as hell to get rid of.The solution to sexually transmitted diseases is to be vigilant and careful, not to stop having sex. If all humans become so afraid of sexually transmitted diseases that they quit having children humanity would be gone. Similar fate would befall you in total anarchism. Be wary of your government, and require it to be open. Please don't bitch about the good and open things the government has done, we need to encourage more of that.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
[disclaimer - I work for Sun, and I KNOW that some of my friends have worked for the NSA, and I KNOW that I have relatives with security clearances. Who knows what's going on that I don't know.] As has been pointed out elsewhere, if the NSA wanted to insert backdoors in software, it is not likely that they would announce it loudly. Ditto for anyone other country's version of the NSA. There is a legitimate national security reason that the NSA would be interested in plugging holes in software that is widely-used within the US -- as bad as worms/spam etc might be, imagine how it would turn out if a nation decided to launch some sort of a cyber attack, concurrent with who knows what other action. That's bad news that we just don't need to hear. As far as the compiler goes, ab-so-lutely, be wary.
The NSA is a huge organization, does a lot of different things, and as a result, it can--like a lot of large companies and agencies--seem a bit schizophrenic.
NSA employees have made significant contributions to Linux already, and there have been the usual arguments over design choices that any such project faces, but there's never been the smallest suggestion of any subterfuge.
OpenSolaris's work is conducted in the light of day, and I doubt the NSA's participation will be any more nefarious there.
Part of the NSA's mandate seems to be to improve the security of everybody's operating systems. That's work that can benefit all of us, is exactly the sort of work that a "national security agency" *should* do, and we should encourage it, while still condemning the projects we disapprove of.
I'll be the first to yell out at things like warrantless wiretapping, but believe it or not, even at NSA they use Windows and Linux/Unix on their hardware. It's in their best interest and the interest of their mission (as a consumer of said OSs) to make sure that those OSs are as secure as they can be. And some of the smartest security researchers on the planet work for NSA. So why not?
One of the NSA's growing missions is also to secure the electronic interests of the United States and its citizens. That includes doing anything they can to help secure the infrastructure of US interests. All our banks and national financial stability rely heavily on the security of computer systems. If they can't benefit from this added security, what's the point of securing a defense system if someone can hack into your federal bank system and make you lose billions?
So things like an overall more secure Solaris or Linux (or even Windows Vista) benefits everyone, including the electronic interests of the citizens of the USA, who the NSA also serves. Remember, they ARE a government agency (an occasionally evil one, though most of them do evil things every now and then.)