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NSA Releases Security-Enhanced Android
An anonymous reader writes with the recent news that, in line with its goal to provide secure phones to government employees in various domains, "The NSA has released a set of security enhancements to Android. These appear to be based on SELinux, which was also originally created by the NSA."
SELinux Android is OSS, same as SELinux. Look at the code yourself if you are convinced there are backdoors. That is part of the point of OSS after all.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Capable? Yes. The NSA hires geniuses. But so do foreign nations, various companies, and universities. If we're going to indulge in an encomium of the extraordinary competence of the NSA, though, the most honest praise would be for an NSA imagined as most likely trying to provide genuine security with this effort, not backdoors, which open up the possibility of breaches or discovery.
Consider the NSA's purpose in making a secure version of Android: it's a system built by geniuses to be operated, in the end, by idiots, who are targeted for attack by other geniuses. From the NSA's perspective, there are two opponents: the brilliant Enemy and the Friendly moron. Leaving a backdoor, however well-obfuscated, provides the brilliant Enemy with an avenue for taking advantage of the Friendly moron who violates security procedures for his ill-conceived convenience. Backdoors allow breaches, and the NSA has to be smart enough to know that there are enough geniuses out there working for the other side(s) to find one and exploit it.
Consider also the fallout if a backdoor were to be discovered in the NSA's source code. Geniuses will be reading this code, if for no other reason than because it demonstrates the NSA's thinking. If someone found a backdoor and, instead of exploiting it or selling it to exploiters, decided to publicize it as an example of a purposeful NSA backdoor, the NSA would lose immense credibility. What kind of turf and funding wars would they face then, if the rest of the government agencies lost trust in them? Would the much-vaunted geniuses of the NSA consider that risk acceptable?
It's in the NSA's interest not to introduce even well-obfuscated backdoors in this product. It is in their interest to have such facilities available in consumer-grade products and exports, and God only knows what's baked into the phone companies' customized builds that they've compiled and installed onto a consumer-grade phone. It is not, however, useful to them to have such access in source code that is publicly available to be read by people looking for problems or compiled by people smart enough to know what they're doing.
If the NSA really is as smart as we'd all like to believe, they'll make this an honest, open, secure product without backdoors or traps. They'll make a product that will solidify their place in the government funding arena as the authority in hardened security.