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De Raadt Doubts Alleged Backdoors Made It Into OpenBSD

Posted by timothy on from the giving-away-all-our-best-tricks dept.

itwbennett writes "In follow-up to last week's controversy over allegations that the FBI installed a number of back doors into the encryption software used by the OpenBSD operating system, OpenBSD lead developer Theo de Raadt said on a discussion list Tuesday, that he believes that a government contracting firm that contributed code to his project 'was probably contracted to write backdoors,' which would grant secret access to encrypted communications. But that he doesn't think that any of this software made it into the OpenBSD code base."

2 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Audit necessary by dewarrn1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I hope that he's right, but without a thorough audit, who can say?

    1. Re:Audit necessary by mysidia · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I hope that he's right, but without a thorough audit, who can say?

      The whole scare behind crypto backdoors is they can include sidechannel leakage, and they can include subtle leakage through the underlying drivers. Which can amount to elaborate timing vulnerabilities and other types of vulnerabilities intentionally introduced that are poorly understood by developers in general.

      Remember... even though the crypto in the SSH protocol was perfectly sound, as you were typing a password in SSH; a timing attack could be used to assist an attacker in guessing the password typed. For example, the minute timing between keystrokes can identify some passwords that are much more likely to have been typed than others, reducing the attack required to something much easier than brute force.

      You can have a backdoor without even revealing the key material or having an obvious vulnerability; all the 3 letter agencies need is a mechanism of reducing the work to crack the key to something much less than brute force. If the operation of the cryptosystem in any way makes the key easier to get than brute force, then the attacker's work is massively reduced.

      In other words, it's so subtle that even a thorough audit cannot say, and a complete rewrite of the code would be required to guarantee no intentionally backdoors by the original authors (though it won't guarantee no backdoors by the new authors. and it definitely won't guarantee no subtle vulnerabilities)

      It's possible can be no visible error for an audit to discover, and yet, the way the code is structured, could cause information to still be vulnerable through essentially a form of compromising virtual emissions.