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Ask Slashdot: Linux Security, In Light of NSA Crypto-Subverting Attacks?
New submitter deepdive writes "I have a basic question: What is the privacy/security health of the Linux kernel (and indeed other FOSS OSes) given all the recent stories about the NSA going in and deliberately subverting various parts of the privacy/security sub-systems? Basically, can one still sleep soundly thinking that the most recent latest/greatest Ubuntu/OpenSUSE/what-have-you distro she/he downloaded is still pretty safe?"
You can sleep soundly if your computer is off and/or unplugged. Otherwise, you should always be on your guard.
Keep your confidential data behind multiple levels of protection, and preferentially disconnected when you are not using it. Never trust anything that is marketed at 100% safe. There will always be bugs to be exploited, if nothing else.
A healthy level of paranoia is the best security tool...
morcego
The NSA is a big organization. They do plenty of things that don't violate the Constitution, international treaties, or common sense.
SELinux is the least of our worries. It's not impossible to hide backdoors or vulnerabilities in an open-source product, but it is pretty difficult. And if the spooks managed to do it, they certainly wouldn't be putting their name on this product, because the people that they're really interested in are even more paranoid than you.
We are being told - and some of us suspected as much for a very long time - that the NSA &Co track everything we do, and have the ability de-encrypt much of what we think is secure; whether through brute force, exploits, backdoors, or corporate collusion.
Surely we should also assume that there are other criminal and/or hacker groups with the resources or skills to gain similar access? Another case of "once they know it can be done, you can't turn back."
I honestly believe that we're finally at the point where the reasonable assumption is that nothing is secure, and that you should act accordingly.
Three Squirrels
I think that depends on what keeps you up at night.
In one of the earlier stories today there was a post making all sorts of claims about compromised software, bad actors, and pointing to this paper: A Cryptographic Evaluation of IPsec. I wonder if anyone bothered to read it?
IPsec was a great disappointment to us. Given the quality of the people that worked on it and the time that was spent on it, we expected a much better result. We are not alone in this opinion; from various discussions with the people involved, we learned that virtually nobody is satised with the process or the result. The development of IPsec seems to have been burdened by the committee process that it was forced to use, and it shows in the results. Even with all the serious critisisms that we have on IPsec, it is probably the best IP security protocol available at the moment. We have looked at other, functionally similar, protocols in the past (including PPTP [SM98, SM99]) in much the same manner as we have looked at IPsec. None of these protocols come anywhere near their target, but the others manage to miss the mark by a wider margin than IPsec.
I even saw calls for the equivalent of mole hunts in the opens source software world. What could possibly go wrong?
Criminals, vandals, and spies have been targeting computers for a very long time. Various types of security problems have been known for 40 years or more, yet they either persist or are reimplemented in interesting new ways with new systems. People make a lot of mistakes in writing software, and managing their systems and sites, and yet the internet overall works reasonably well. Of course it still has boatloads of problems, including both security and privacy issues.
Frankly I think you have much more to worry about from unpatched buggy software, poor configuration, unmonitored logs, lack of firewalls, crackers or vandals, and the usual problems sites have than from a US national intelligence agency. That is assuming you and 10 of your closes friends from Afghanistan aren't planning to plant bombs in shopping malls, or try to steal the blueprints for the new antitank missiles. Something to keep in mind is that their resources are limited, and they have more important things to do unless you make yourself important for them to look at. If you make yourself important for them to look, a "secure" computer won't stop them. You should probably worry more about ordinary criminal hackers, vandals, and automated probe / hack attacks.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
You do, but if you're that worried, there's always truecrypt and keepassx. If you keep the database in a truecrypt encrypted partition, the NSA can't get at that with any reasonable period of time. You can also ditch the keepassx and just store it as plain text in the encrypted partition, but that's not very convenient.
Can you be sure that Truecrypt has no backdoors? If so, how?
you are not important enough to be a target.
Wrong. You may become important in the future. So you are important enough to target. They are collecting data on everyone, and holding on to it. They just might not be actively going through all the data from everyone (or they might be, if they have enough computing power). But if it's recorded it doesn't really matter if they do it today or in 20 years. They've got you. "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." --Richelieu
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Maybe modern ones, but if you go back a few generations your chances of it existing drop drastically. so what you do for high security....
1 - rely on OLDER hardware. Stuff from before the past two administrations would have a significantly higher chance of not having government back doors. Clinton era computers to start with.
2 - use a completely different architecture. ARM is your best friend here or SPARC. The chances of SPARC having this are insanely small
3 - Get processors from your countries "enemy" Russians dont use Intel processors for their KGB and Government operations. If they did they would be the biggest morons on the planet. Find out what they use and try to source them through the black or grey market channels.
Welcome to the new world of underground computer science. Oh and keep your mouths shut. Don't do stupid shit like bragging as to what you have and where you got it. I'd say "hack the planet" but the safest thing is to go off the net and transfer data via offline means for the highest security.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Bingo.
How many Intel or nVidia employees... How many Broadcom or Qualcom employees need to be placed by NSA, into their otherwise ordinary engineering jobs?
How many Mossad associated employees? Whoops. I guess that's anti-Semitic. I'd have to ask how many PLA planted engineers, as there's no recognized anti-Sinoism. ;-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
What would you do if you where a Chinese or Russian spook and discover a NSA backdoor in Linux ? You could cry foul! to Linus and get it fixed. However: a much more profitable action would be to silently fix it in your own security critical machines and then exploit it as much as possible on your targets in the West.