Linus Torvalds Admits He's Been Asked To Insert Backdoor Into Linux

darthcamaro writes "At the Linuxcon conference in New Orleans today, Linus Torvalds joined fellow kernel developers in answering a barrage of questions about Linux development. One question he was asked was whether a government agency had ever asked about inserting a back-door into Linux. Torvalds responded 'no' while shaking his head 'yes,' as the audience broke into spontaneous laughter. Torvalds also admitted that while he as a full life outside of Linux he couldn't imagine his life without it. 'I don't see any project coming along being more interesting to me than Linux,' Torvalds said. 'I couldn't imagine filling the void in my life if I didn't have Linux.'"

Comments

Would probably be found

[MadX]

*If* such a mechanism was coded in, the nature of open source would mean it would be found by others. This in turn would compromise the trust of the ENTIRE kernel. That trust can take years to build up - but be detroyed in a heartbeat.

Re:Would probably be found

[phantomfive]

That trust can take years to build up - but be detroyed in a heartbeat.

You'd think so, but somehow people still trust Windows, even though it most certainly has been compromised.

Re:Would probably be found

[DerPflanz]

Being compromised isn't the issue. The Linux kernel has been compromised as well.

The issue here, is that there is a backdoor being built-in deliberately. That could compromise trust.

Re:Would probably be found

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Yes, that's the conventional wisdom with open-source. But tell me: when was the last time you went inspect the code deep in the kernel? How many open-source code users do you think have the time, desire and ability - and probably paranoia - to go and inspect the code in *any* open-source project of reasonable size, let alone something as complex as the kernel?

I don't think someone could slip funny code in the main kernel tree - too many specialists reviewing the patches - but I'm convinced that if Canonical, SuSE or RH wanted to distribute a tainted kernel, they could do it undetected for a very long time, if not indefinitely.

Re:Would probably be found

[phantomfive]

The issue here, is that there is a backdoor being built-in deliberately. That could compromise trust.

There is that possibility. Once again, this is a possibility we've known about for a while, and it hasn't caused people to leave Windows in droves. I think it's something most people just must not care about.

Re:Would probably be found

[mwvdlee]

If anybody were somehow forced to submit a backdoor, it would be very easy to just tip off a random fellow developer to "discover" it.

Re:Would probably be found

[jma05]

It's unlikely that such a backdoor, should it exist, would be coded so obviously, since the source is published. Instead, it would more likely be in the form of a subtle buffer overflow that results in previlige escalation or such, such that when found, it could simply be labeled as a bug rather than an backdoor... plausible deniability.

Re:Would probably be found

[Jeremi]

*If* such a mechanism was coded in, the nature of open source would mean it would be found by others. This in turn would compromise the trust of the ENTIRE kernel. That trust can take years to build up - but be detroyed in a heartbeat.

If it was obviously a deliberate back door, sure. Which is why the clever hacker/government-agency would be a lot more subtle -- rather than a glaring "if (username == "backdoor") allowRootAccess();", they'd put a very subtle mistake into the code instead. If the mistake was detected, they could then simply say "oops, my bad", and it would be fixed for the next release, but other than that nobody would be any the wiser. Repeat as necessary, and the visible results might not look too different from what we actually have.

Re:Would probably be found

[Starky]

Code does not have to be fully reviewed for the open source development process to discipline attempts at compromise. There is a nonzero probability that any given piece of code will be reviewed for reasons other than looking for a back door, and if the probability is higher than trivial, it would dissuade parties from attempting to surreptitiously put in a back door. If a back door were found, the contributor would be known and repercussions would follow.

Moreover, I would not be at all surprised if foreign governments who have a national security interest in running uncompromised operating systems have devoted time and resources specifically to code review of the kernel for potential compromises.

Re:Would probably be found

[gigaherz]

Most of us don't feel important enough to worry about some government knowing our secrets. Yes, we know this gives a means for those governments to identify the people who have something to hide, and that isn't always a good thing, but it's easier than being paranoid.

Re:Would probably be found

[Camembert]

Well, many people use a precompiled linux distribution. It is not trivial to know whether there is a backdoor in any of those binaries.

Re:Would probably be found

[rioki]

Do you compile your programs from source and check that it is the last valid version from the project or do you install rpm or deb binary packages? Even if the actual project is vetted, it is near impossible to validate everything that comes though the automatic updates. This is definitely a point of failure, since you only need one person, the person that has access to the signing keys and the update server. So you trust canonical, red hat, SuSe to be fully vetted? Open source is better than closed source vendors, but in the end, if you download binaries you are in the mercy of the person who built them.

Re:Would probably be found

[AlphaWoIf_HK]

You don't even need to have something to hide; you just need to anger the wrong people at the wrong time. What the government thinks is 'bad' is not necessarily what you think is 'bad,' so you're always in danger, no matter how unimportant you believe yourself to be.

Re:Would probably be found

[JavaBear]

One current example is the subtle weakening of the RNG's which in turn is claimed to reduce for instance 128 bit symmetric keys to effectively just 32-bit strength.

I can't recall where I saw that stated, and I have no idea how that would work.

Re: Would probably be found

[Anonymous Coward]

As Thompson explains in his Reflections on trusting Trust (http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html) even if you download everything in source form, and review it, you are still susceptible to manipulation if you use the compiler binary and haven't reviewed it's source.

Or the source of the compiler compiling that compiler, and so on.

Re:Would probably be found

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you use a compromised compiler to insert the backdoor.

Re:Would probably be found

[Mr. Freeman]

You raise a good point, and there's actually a lot of evidence proving you correct. There have been more than a few security vulnerabilities that have persisted in the code for various widely-used pieces of open-source software for years. One was even found and patched but then quickly reverted without anyone noticing.

What people fail to understand is that proper security reviews are more than "let's just take a look at the code and make sure that it's not sending email to the NSA." You also can't perform a proper review with a bunch of hobbyist coders, you need highly-trained experts. Every single line of code needs to be checked, double checked, and triple checked against every single other line in the code to make sure that there isn't anything that could possibly compromise the security of the system. These failures are always subtle and usually unintentional.

This is best summed up with an example. Any idiot can look at the code and say "wait a second, this code copies the decryption key and sends an email to the NSA!" Only a very methodical search with a lot of people can say "hey, we've determined that this implementation of this specific part of this specific algorithm probably doesn't have a large amount of randomness over a long period of time. It likely decays such that the complexity is reduced to such and such a number of bits after such and such an amount of time and in these specific situations. This is a problem!"

Re:Would probably be found

[AlphaWoIf_HK]

They don't have to torture you to make your life miserable.

Re:Would probably be found

[oneandoneis2]

Since bugs like those crop up anyway, it's probably easier to find & exploit existing bugs than to force somebody to introduce them..

Re:Would probably be found

[jamesh]

How many open-source code users do you think have the time, desire and ability - and probably paranoia - to go and inspect the code in *any* open-source project of reasonable size, let alone something as complex as the kernel?

There's a whole industry evolved around finding exploitable holes in Windows, and there's no source available for that at all[1]. You can be sure the bad guys have given it a thorough going over and if there was a generic hole (I doubt you could slip an "if password = NSA then accept" style patch by the gatekeeper so it would need to be subtle and generic) it would be found. Admittedly this is not ideal but as soon as the bad guys use their exploit it will be effectively disclosed and then fixed.

[1] actually it would be reasonable to assume that at least some source for windows is in the hands of the bad guys...

Re:Would probably be found

[jamesh]

Or you use a compromised compiler to insert the backdoor.

Yes it can always be injected at the source->binary level, even maliciously by your distributor themselves...

Re:Would probably be found

[vague regret]

According to the recent human brain study, facts do not matter. So no wonder people still believe in things like Windows (or open-source) safety and security...

Re:Would probably be found

[AHuxley]

It could be a list of efforts first: A break in? A fake utility worker? Small truck hitting a car door?

Re:Would probably be found

[dmcq]

Have a look at some of the code from the 'Underhanded C Contest' at http://underhanded.xcott.com/ where people write code that looks straightforward and nice and clear but contains deliberate evil bugs. I think that should remove any complacency and the NSA has a lot of money to spend on people posing as developers never mind the ones they stick onto standards bodies.

Re:Would probably be found

[ozmanjusri]

I can't recall where I saw that stated, and I have no idea how that would work.

It was a potential exploit on Intel's Ivy Bridge RNGs, and it wouldn't work on Linux, as /dev/random etc mix RDRAND with many other sources of entropy.

Re:Would probably be found

[Chrisq]

*If* such a mechanism was coded in, the nature of open source would mean it would be found by others. This in turn would compromise the trust of the ENTIRE kernel. That trust can take years to build up - but be detroyed in a heartbeat.

As a Linux user who downloads a compiled distribution I can't help worrying that the organisations building the distributions may also have been asked, and maybe given incentives, to put backdoors into the binaries. How do I know that the binary comes from the public source?

Re:Would probably be found

[mcvos]

Discrediting people is much more efficient than torturing them.

Re:Would probably be found

[Talar]

This, and add to it that whatever is 'bad' doesn't have to be 'bad' today since the data will be kept practically forever for any future government to analyze. If you still don't have anything to hide you must have a confidence in both the current and all future governments that is so unshakeable I'd almost call it stupidity.

Re:Would probably be found

[cardpuncher]

Or possibly, the discovery of such a mechanism would conveniently distract attention from the possibility of, say, a backdoor in the processor itself by means of which an unlikely but valid instruction stream might, for example, give kernel privileges to a program running in user mode. An open source software exploit might be intended to be found, and removed, thus restoring your false sense of security in your possibly compromised hardware.

Re:Would probably be found

[michelcolman]

Then again, the back door would be easier to find by criminals. I don't personally care that much about the NSA snooping through my e-mails. But if some criminal can read them just as easily, it's a different story.

Re:Would probably be found

[byeley]

Attempts have been discovered, ie http://www.securityfocus.com/news/7388

They haven't compromised trust to any significant degree, presumably because they're obscure?

I'm torn on the question of whether there's a deliberate backdoor at present. On one hand, discovered security breeches are like roaches (many exist for each one you discover), but on the other, I don't know of any found in actual releases and the find mentioned above was some damn fine code review.

Re:Would probably be found

[michelcolman]

http://underhanded.xcott.com/

It's amazing what some of these people come up with to hide malicious code using seemingly honest coding mistakes that are hard to spot. And I'm sure the NSA can do even better than them. Certainly in a huge, complex piece of code like the Linux kernel. And how many people really inspect that code anyway?

Re:Would probably be found

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the fact that people (myself) actually don't care is that most of us (99.99%) wouldn't have a problem, since we're not doing anything illegal. I know that it is still wrong, but i just don't care

Re:Would probably be found

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to assume that there are no criminals at all part of "the NSA". Considering the number of employees they have with most having fairly complete access it is almost certain that there are criminals with access to a lot of NSA data.

Re:Would probably be found

[Bert64]

The conventional wisdom is that while open source is not perfect, it's still better than the alternatives - and the same applies to virtually everything.

I would rather have something that i *can* investigate and/or modify to suit my needs, and where multiple unrelated third parties can do the same thing. The chance of a backdoor existing are lower, and the chance of one being found if it were introduced is higher...

And this is for me as an individual, a foreign government is likely to be far more concerned, and also far better funded so they can employ a large number of people to audit the code thoroughly.

Re:Would probably be found

[AlphaWoIf_HK]

It is foolish to assume that the people working for the government are perfect angels who could never mean you any harm; this has never been true and never will be true.

Re:Would probably be found

[q.kontinuum]

Since bugs like those crop up anyway[...]

Well, that's the thing... Do they crop up anyway or are these bugs already the intentional backdoors?

Re:Would probably be found

[Bert64]

[1] actually it would be reasonable to assume that at least some source for windows is in the hands of the bad guys...

And that is the worst part...

The malicious groups have more access than the good guys. A legitimate security researcher cannot get to see the source code without complying with the terms dictated by the vendor, while a malicious hacker can obtain copies of the source and go through it freely.

Re:Would probably be found

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

What a lot of people fail to recognise is that the people in charge of governments and the state tend to have the mentality and vindictiveness of very small children. Unfortunately, they also have an adults guile. Assumming that small children will behave rationally, reasonably, or for the common good is not a legitimate strategy.

Re:Would probably be found

[Joce640k]

What if it was your neighbor reading your mail? Would you still shrug it off?

Re:Would probably be found

[Joining Yet Again]

From the description of the study, it seems to me that people who have formed an opinion won't change it just because they see a single piece of potentially falsified or misleading evidence. For example (looking at one of the experiments), if someone has an opinion on joblessness in the US - which might bring in factors of job stability, hours worked or attainment of a living wage - seeing a single graph on number of employed people in recent years does not allow us to conclude that joblessness has been reduced under Obama, unless you have a very primitive interpretation of "joblessness".

The only damning conclusion is that some academics are so arrogant that they assume test subjects must be faulty if they don't immediately believe the academic's interpretation of some data presented to them.

Re:Would probably be found

[Dagger2]

Any idiot can look at the code

But not if it's closed. Being open source may not be a magical panacea, but it is a prerequisite.

Re:Would probably be found

[Greyfox]

It'd just be an option when you compile the kernel. "NSA Backdoor: Enable this to install a back door in your kernel which the NSA can use to spy on you. [on][off]"

Re:Would probably be found

[Millennium]

But if the NSA can get in, then it is only a matter of time before someone else figures out how. Whether or not I trust the NSA barely even matters, because I certainly don't trust this next entity.

This is why I prefer something the NSA can't get into: there's probably nobody else who can either. The NSA's cracking efforts hold considerable value for that reason: they can, and should, be letting us know when our machines are not secure enough. The problem arises when they fail to do this, which seems to have been the case in recent years.

Re:Would probably be found

[Anonymous Coward]

Few people are more expert on C and the x86 memory architecture than the Linux kernel devs, and none are more expert on Linux than the kernel devs themselves.

But I can tell you're one of 'those' people, who can't conceive that people are capable of learning and becoming experts without some certificate granting jerkoff/circlejerk club to sanctify their alleged expertness with a wax stamped piece of paper.

"hey, we've determined that this implementation of this specific part of this specific algorithm probably doesn't have a large amount of randomness over a long period of time."

An algorithm doesn't, by definition, have any randomness, so it's clear you yourself don't know what the fuck you're talking about, and are not such an expert. "Random number generator" code doesn't actually generate random numbers, it mixes deterministically numbers from a probabilistic source, which ideally has a normal distribution, but generally doesn't, and thus uses a spreading function (of a specific class: trapdoor function) that is designed to make it computationally expensive and/or information expensive (needs a long run of output), to approximate a normal distribution from it's input(s).

And the Linux and BSD random number "generators" (though filter or conditioner is a more apt name), are two of the most well studied and audited filters. Besides the kernel developers, there are many independent, professional auditors who have reviewed the Linux crypto code, and granted various criteria certifications for specific versions of it.

And despite both these groups, professional auditors and kernel developers, spending serious time, effort and money on validating the security of Linux and BSD, security defects are still found from time to time, sometimes in very old code. There really is no "highly-trained experts" capable of completely proving the security of these kernels, ignoring the near-impossible task of proving hardware secure (can always make a more sensitive SQUID), and you are certainly not anything like the experts who DO audit them.

Re:Would probably be found

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you can't tell the difference between the NSA and some criminal, it's actually the same story.

Re: Would probably be found

[Anonymous Coward]

Since what the NSA is doing is criminal they are criminals by deffinition.

Re:Would probably be found

[DragonTHC]

SELinux came at a price. Now go find it.

Re:Would probably be found

[RabidReindeer]

I think the fact that people (myself) actually don't care is that most of us (99.99%) wouldn't have a problem, since we're not doing anything illegal. I know that it is still wrong, but i just don't care

No, you only think that you're not doing anything illegal. You have no concept of just how many laws cover every single thing you do. Or, for that matter, don't do. Legal experts know better. So do the people who monitor the street cameras when you step off the curb prematurely.

THAT is the problem. If someone for whatever reason decides that they don't like you, they can pull that data and metadata and use it as supporting evidence for whatever transgressions they deem suitable to nail you for. At a minimum they can make your life difficult in a thousand ways (no-fly lists, for example). In extreme cases, you could be labelled an "Enemy Combatant" and wake up in Gitmo. Especially if someone "accidentally" tagged the data with aggravating information.

The problem with "Innocent People Have Nothing To Hide", as I've said before, is that you aren't the one that gets to decide what makes people "innocent".

Re:Would probably be found

[RabidReindeer]

I'm not in Gitmo yet

Re:Would probably be found

[iapetus]

If Windows users and Linux users wanted the same things out of their operating systems all of them would be using Linux because of the price tag.

Assuming Linux provided those things at least as well as Windows, of course.

Re:Would probably be found

[hughk]

You also can't perform a proper review with a bunch of hobbyist coders, you need highly-trained experts. Every single line of code needs to be checked, double checked, and triple checked against every single other line in the code to make sure that there isn't anything that could possibly compromise the security of the system. These failures are always subtle and usually unintentional.

If you are writing for some critical applications like a flight control computer then it is clear that there will many formal reviews. However, in most systems, commercial users do not have that luxury. Everything tends to be time boxed. With the status of Linux not only as a usable O/S but also as a teaching tool, new people are studying the kernel all the time (and performing exercises like "how random is the RNG"). However "hobbyist" it may seem, and especially with the methods used by the kernel maintainers, there is probably more scrutiny than with commercial systems.

Re:Would probably be found

[AmiMoJo]

I'm not so sure. The NSA monitors all email and basically 0wns the internet. You could try to tip them off in person but chances are they would be watching you carefully for that kind of behaviour. If you did reveal what they forced you to do at the very least there would be jail time, if not gitmo time and a bit of torture.

It's hard to understate just how screwed we are.

Re:Would probably be found

[Waikido]

Any bug is a security problem - therefore any security problem can be made to look like a bug. There is sufficient plausible deniability here, the treat of repercussions is not a real treat. I'm also not convinced at all that even a thorough and massive audit of open source software has the potential to reveal all intentional faults, in spite of widespread belief here that says otherwise. Given the complexity of programming, any decent and devoted team of programmers who spends time thinking about introducting bugs (rather than thinking about finding and avoiding them in software written in good faith, like we're used to) can probably find lots of little gems that will remain undetected for decades, if not forever. Our mind has to follow what's going on in software in order to verify its correctness, and our mind is very limited. Open source protects against compromises by the little people, yes, but not by well-funded organisations. Let's not kid ourselves. Also, if foreign governments review code and find vulnerabilities, what makes you think they would share them back with the community?

Re:Would probably be found

[Yvanhoe]

Snowden could snoop through emails and is considered a criminal by the US government.

Re:Would probably be found

[Savage-Rabbit]

You raise a good point, and there's actually a lot of evidence proving you correct. There have been more than a few security vulnerabilities that have persisted in the code for various widely-used pieces of open-source software for years. One was even found and patched but then quickly reverted without anyone noticing.

What people fail to understand is that proper security reviews are more than "let's just take a look at the code and make sure that it's not sending email to the NSA." You also can't perform a proper review with a bunch of hobbyist coders, you need highly-trained experts. Every single line of code needs to be checked, double checked, and triple checked against every single other line in the code to make sure that there isn't anything that could possibly compromise the security of the system. These failures are always subtle and usually unintentional.

This is best summed up with an example. Any idiot can look at the code and say "wait a second, this code copies the decryption key and sends an email to the NSA!" Only a very methodical search with a lot of people can say "hey, we've determined that this implementation of this specific part of this specific algorithm probably doesn't have a large amount of randomness over a long period of time. It likely decays such that the complexity is reduced to such and such a number of bits after such and such an amount of time and in these specific situations. This is a problem!"

You are right. The problem is that there are, and always will be, fewer experts checking for subtle errors like this and we haven't even begun to consider cleverly hidden weaknesses that are injected into complex pieces of software like encryption APIs or entire FOSS foundations set up by the NAS/CIA/MI6/FSB and other intelligence agencies with the deliberate aim of popularising compromised software. The basic lesson seems to be what Al-Qaeda learned a decade ago. If you want to be really secure, couriers and offline communications are the way to go. The Russians have even gone a step further and moved all super sensitive material to paper and use typewriters instead of computers. It is way harder to steal a paper intelligence report that is typed up in a limited number of carefully tracked hard copies that you have to sign for and who stay in a secure environment than it is to hack somebody's supposedly secure Blackberry/Android/iOS device and steal the PDF of that intelligence report from the e-mail attachments folder.

Re:Would probably be found

[N1AK]

He wasn't saying it should happen. He was saying why he and most other people don't care.

As to your hypothesised scenario where they vanish people off to Gitmo or some such. Do you really think that if they could do that to pretty much any American citizen that them being able to see that you forgot to declare a $5 ebay purchase for sales tax is going to make it possible when they otherwise couldn't?

It is wrong, and I do care, but lets not go pretending that intrusive government surveillance is what makes illegal rendition, falsifying evidence or harassment by the state a problem.

Re: Would probably be found

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Hah. Assume they are. What god complexes people have to assume they are worthy of the NSA snooping on them. Be a good person and you have nothing to worry about. Government agencies have snooped on their citizens for decades, remember the analog phone system? Digital cellular still uses the same backbone.

And, of course, advances in technology have had no effect whatsoever on how cheap, per person, surveillance is over the past few decades. None at all, nope, you still have to be radical enough to get three guys wearing headphones and looking real intense allocated to listening to you. Idiot.

Re:Would probably be found

[Waikido]

It is funny to try and reason like a spy agency. Or sad. Anyway, here goes.

One option is (a) to convince several Linux distributors to alter the software they distribute each and every time they distribute it, with many people at many different companies knowing with you do and possibly being able to exploit this themselves. Another option is (b) to review the code yourself and try to find as many vulnerabilities as possible and keep them to yourself. You can also (c) hire a group of talented people and devise extremely subtle changes to code that will only result in a crucial error after a specific sequence of 57 events took place. How confident are you that specialists will spot that, by the way? I wonder where anyone having written code gets that optimism from. Or you can (d) develop a highly sophisticated piece of code, call it security enhancing, and actually try to have it officially included in an open-source project without any attempt to hide where it is coming from.

Among those, option (a) is not a long-term solution and is unlikely to be pursued by agencies in my opinion. I would not go there if I were a spy agency. Options (b), (c) and (d) are very likely to have happened.

I can't believe that they managed to pull off (d). This is not something I would have thought of or dared to try.

Re: Would probably be found

[felix rayman]

Read the constitution.

Re:Would probably be found

[felix rayman]

You are doing something illegal - everyone is. You may not even know what you are doing that is illegal, but if the NSA knows everything you do, they know what you are doing that is illegal.

They aren't going to do anything about it until you do some thing that is legal that they don't want you to do.

If you run for office, they own you.

Re:Would probably be found

[buck-yar]

People get very mad when an average person spies on them (check out that surveillance man http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CONgeNlxVug)

But govt doing the same thing is ok in most people's book. Look at many cities and the CCTV cameras everywhere, nobody has much issue with those, but if a private citizen points a camera at someone, that's terrifying / criminal to people.

Re:Would probably be found

[KiloByte]

Uhm no, that's merely a flimsy far-fetched excuse. "Because NSA reminded us about something" is not a reason a sane programmer would name that symbol NSAKEY. If you believe that, I have a slightly-used bridge to sell.

Re: Would probably be found

[buck-yar]

I guess you probably think search warrants are stupid too, I mean what citizen wants the police to jump through hoops to catch criminals? If you have nothing to hide you should have no problem getting rid of police obstacles to ensuring our safety, right?

Re:Would probably be found

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

*If* such a mechanism was coded in, the nature of open source would mean it would be found by others. This in turn would compromise the trust of the ENTIRE kernel. That trust can take years to build up - but be detroyed in a heartbeat.

If I were in Linus' position, I'd be tempted to build a so-obvious-as-to-be-sarcastic backdoor just for giggles. Something along the lines of Linux Genuine Advantage; but with lots of suspicious TLAs in the comments.

Though, architecturally, a PAM module might be a better place for such a thing.

Re:Would probably be found

[RaceProUK]

I think the fact that people (myself) actually don't care is that most of us (99.99%) wouldn't have a problem, since we're not doing anything illegal.

I'd wager that everyone breaks at least one law every day. True, you may never be punished for it (as usually it's such a trivial thing it doesn't matter), but such activities may be used against you in the future (though the chances are pretty remote).

Re:Would probably be found

[Peter Simpson]

I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when a couple of dark-suited guys in shades asked Linus to insert a back door in Linux. I'm sure there's a classified report of the attempt filed somewhere at NSA.

Good on Linus for declining

Re: Would probably be found

[Anonymous Coward]

Schneier's 2006 post about a counter https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/countering_trus.html should be mentioned.

Re:Would probably be found

[Anonymous Coward]

"The problem with "Innocent People Have Nothing To Hide", as I've said before, is that you aren't the one that gets to decide what makes people "innocent"."

Very well said. I would only add that "Freedom" is nothing more than the ability to not have to expose everything. The more agencies that crop up, the more people there are in those agencies, the more people that are to stop you and require you to expose your stuff, the less free we all are.

The government's theory is: The more that people are willing to log info about themselves online, the more data we have to sift through, looking for possible bad situations.

But the sad truth for them is, no one is capable of taking the large amount of data, read it, and actually understand it. They look it over like a doctor, only looking for bad signs. Only bad signs can be seen once they're bad. No one can be expected to find "future bad". It's silly that the people would respect anything that PRISM produces, and any 'bad guys' that get found out by means of the PRISM system are those that the 'good guys' have deemed as 'bad guys', and arranged their data to accommodate their suspicions.

Re:Would probably be found

[Antique Geekmeister]

While correct, this is hardly a kernel specific problem. In many environments, local packages are published without GPG signatures, and installed quite arbitrarily from poorly secured internal repositories and poorly managed third party repositories. Even the most reputable repositories are vulnerable to having their build environments penetrated and signed, but backdoor-enabled packages, published.

Personally, I don't trust Canonical because of their poor attitudes about sending personal system data back to their ad service business. It makes me question their other security practices. Red Hat and the Debian developers have earned my trust through years of thoughtful, public security practice, especially when confronted with security impinging situations.

Re:Would probably be found

[Austerity Empowers]

test subjects must be faulty if they don't immediately believe the academic's interpretation of some data presented to them.

Probably the actual discovery in this experiment: There were a lot of faulty test subjects.

Re:Would probably be found

[Yomers]

We are not THAT screwed yet. PGP encrypted email is still secure? Torchat is probably secure and anonymous, in a sense it's impossible to decrypt conversation and figure out who is talking to who.

Re:Would probably be found

[Antique Geekmeister]

It's been tried. The Fedora and Red Hat build serves were compromised back in 2008, and replaced or scrubbed practically in real time while new GPG signature keys were switched to and published, to avoid the possible installation of binaries whose provenance was compromised.

Re:Would probably be found

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that the evil engineers at NSA (they have CS PHDs for that) can easily create a highly complex mechanism for the bug to be inserted. The bug will never be triggered, not even by "fuzzing", if the fuzzer does not specifically craft the fuzzing towards the bug. It will be so complicated that a highly distintive, exact sequence of events need to happen. They have months or even years to design that piece of code.

Then they walk up to Mr Torvalds, display a "National Security Letter" (NSLs from NSA !), and request him to insert said piece of code.

In short, all American technology is mortally compromised for those who are not "on their side".

Re:Would probably be found

[Joining Yet Again]

It certainly makes for better headlines than, "Extraordinary results explained by bad methodology."

Re: Would probably be found

[techprophet]

Open source is kind of like democracy: the worst possible distribution method except for all the others.

Re:Would probably be found

[jbmartin6]

And, of course, police can lie or be mistaken. Frame ups and amazing coincidences might be rare but they do happen. Our rights are there, in part, to protect against these circumstances. There are plenty of cases of people in jail who had nothing to hide, but ended up charged and convicted anyway.

Re: Would probably be found

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the constitution.

Many people have, and there are constitutional lawyers that have decided that it isn't against the law. Of course, they work for the government, but until someone can prove them wrong, you've got an opinion, they've got an opinion, and they're operating under the power of the people who make the decision about who is right and wrong.
 
I'm not saying your opinion is worthless, and I'm not saying you're wrong. I AM saying that if you're right, and they're wrong, you're not going to make change by crying about it on slashdot.

Re:Would probably be found

[Anonymous Coward]

In extreme cases, you could be labelled an "Enemy Combatant" and wake up in Gitmo.

Except they won't. No one arrested within the US has been sent to Guatanamo Bay; only one American has been sent to Gitmo period, and he was transferred once they realized he was an American. Furthermore, no one's been sent to Gitmo since 2008.

There's plenty of government excesses to be worried about, though, without making things up.

Re: Would probably be found

[Chrisq]

how about intentionally not patching know security holes immediatly?

happens all the time in open source, especially on less bleading edge type distros where corporations are involved.

Interesting thought. I always knew that this happened but thought it was just "lets wait until the bleeding edge distros iron out the issues". There may well be cases where pressure is put on distros to delay a fix too; either "in the interests of National Security", or "In order to get a government support contract", etc. -- ~~~~

Re:Would probably be found

[nooneelsesname]

You should care, even if you 'are not doing anything illegal', for the simple reason that you don't get to decide what is illegal. When 'the powers that be' (ie, whoever has real power) decides that you need to get steamrollered they will make *something* that you are doing 'illegal' and steamroller you. C'mon. Wake up.

What you probably mean, is that you believe you are too insignificant to ever be a threat to anyone with real power, so they'll never bother with you. Kinda feeble view of yourself.

Re:Would probably be found

[bytesex]

Where in the article does it say that he declined?

Re:Would probably be found

[danudwary]

>Define "you". Some "you"'s government folks want to harm by definition.

Plus, over the course of a lifetime, the "you"s change.

Re:Would probably be found

[Hatta]

You seem to assume that there are no criminals at all part of "the NSA".

The NSA itself is comprised of criminals. From the agent who accesses data he has no legitimate right to, to James Clapper who lies about it to Congress. The NSA is a criminal organization.

Re:Would probably be found

[Perky_Goth]

On the other hand, everything you do will be recorded forever so it can be used a a convenient time.

Re:Would probably be found

[DoofusOfDeath]

According to the recent human brain study, facts do not matter. So no wonder people still believe in things like Windows (or open-source) safety and security...

Then why are you presenting a fact?

Re:Would probably be found

[DoofusOfDeath]

As someone who used to work for the U.S. government, I can say that not everyone there is pure evil. I worked in the DoD, and it was more or less a normal workplace. If anything we were more sticklers for obeying the law there then we were anywhere else I've worked. Maybe because the lack of profit pressure removed one possible temptation to break the law.

Re:Would probably be found

[timholman]

No, you only think that you're not doing anything illegal. You have no concept of just how many laws cover every single thing you do. Or, for that matter, don't do. Legal experts know better. So do the people who monitor the street cameras when you step off the curb prematurely.

THAT is the problem. If someone for whatever reason decides that they don't like you, they can pull that data and metadata and use it as supporting evidence for whatever transgressions they deem suitable to nail you for.

It isn't just online. The average U.S. citizen breaks (by some estimates) about three federal laws each day, not to mention countless state and local laws. A cop who knows his laws can stop and detain you just about any time he chooses, because he'll be able to cite at least one law that you broke.

My own anecdote: many years back, when I first began working at my current job, I was commuting back and forth from a relative's house while my wife and I were looking for our own place to buy. I would travel about 20 minutes by interstate every morning and evening, and always observed a lot of state troopers pulling people over in the evenings. What I did not realize at the time was that this particular stretch of road was a major drug corridor, and that the troopers were looking for mules hauling large stashes.

One night I had to work late and was driving home after dark. Knowing how active the patrols were, I made certain to set my cruise control at the speed limit, so I wasn't particularly concerned when I saw a state trooper in my rear-view mirror - until the lights started flashing.

At the time I still had my Arizona license plates on my car, and the cops were sure they had a hot one. After a 15-minute stop and search of my car, I was on my way home. But what was the state trooper's excuse for stopping me?

You know those little plastic frames that auto dealers put around your license plate, with the dealer's name on it? Well, as it turns out, where I live it is illegal to obscure any part of your license plate, which means that I was breaking the law by having that plastic frame overlap my plate along the edges and corners. It gave the state trooper probable cause to stop me. At least he didn't give me a ticket.

The moral? Don't assume that this sort of behavior by the authorities is anything new, just because it happens online.

Re:Would probably be found

[Anonymous Coward]

The State is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large

  -- Murray Rothbard

Re:Would probably be found

[OakDragon]

But how can we take the word of a criminal?

Re:Would probably be found

[cascadingstylesheet]

Yes, that's the conventional wisdom with open-source. But tell me: when was the last time you went inspect the code deep in the kernel? How many open-source code users do you think have the time, desire and ability - and probably paranoia - to go and inspect the code in *any* open-source project of reasonable size, let alone something as complex as the kernel?

Great point - just because theoretically everything could be caught doesn't mean that it will be. And how many of us just use binaries? And who inspects every source tree that they compile?

Re:Would probably be found

[interkin3tic]

I think GP was merely pointing out an alternative reason the government shouldn't be given the keys to everything, a reason that should appeal even to those poor idiots who don't realize their government can do evil. They probably worry more about identity theft from non-government criminals than their privacy being invaded by the government. That's not entirely unjustified: if you don't sell drugs or associate with terrorists, the government probably isn't going to lock you up without rights based on their spying, while non-government cyber criminals will cause you problems no matter how good a citizen you are. (Assuming you aren't of middle-eastern heritage anyway).

Re:Would probably be found

[DoofusOfDeath]

Touché. Excuse me while I go knock over a liquor store.

Re:Would probably be found

[DoofusOfDeath]

The point I was trying to make was that the GP referred to "the government", almost as though it were a monolithic entity.

When civil servants in the DoD break the law, it usually involves stuff like accepting bribes for contract steering, timecard fraud, etc. And most of the civil servants in the DoD didn't do that stuff. It's annoying, and they definitely deserve some jail time, but it's kind of a normal part of life that's to be expected.

When civil servants in the NSA or CIA to bad stuff, it can (and has) involved spying on all Americans, kidnapping, and torture. My point is that I think we should treat NSA/CIA criminals as probably more dangerous to our country than most DoD wrongdoing.

Re:Would probably be found

[fsagx]

Saint Augustine gives you +1 insightful.

Re:Would probably be found

[Zero__Kelvin]

". I don't personally care that much about the NSA snooping through my e-mails. But if some criminal can read them just as easily, it's a different story."

If you are a US citizen that is a complete contradiction. By definition the NSA people snooping through a US citizens e-mails are criminals.

Re: Would probably be found

[Anonymous Coward]

Courts have ruled that black people are chattel, based on their reading of the Constitution. Just because some hack in a robe says it is so doesn't make it true. The same goes for these judges who invent all sorts of exceptions to the 4th Amendment and Due Process that cannot be legitimately found in the Constitution.

Re:Would probably be found

[Rob the Bold]

You seem to assume that there are no criminals at all part of "the NSA".

The NSA itself is comprised of criminals. From the agent who accesses data he has no legitimate right to, to James Clapper who lies about it to Congress. The NSA is a criminal organization.

But having freelance criminals within still makes things even worse, since they may be looking to exploit different things for different gains. Like having NSA backdoors also used by the Russian mob and teenage webcam peepers, plus all sorts of things I haven't even thought of by people I haven't imagined.

Of course, one could argue that the mere presence of a deliberate backdoor is just an invitation to other individuals, organizations and states to exploit as well. Consider those luggage locks the TSA can open without cutting. You don't have to be too paranoid to figure that with one key opening all "TSA-friendly" luggage locks, someone has a copy of that for "personal" purposes, too.

Re:Would probably be found

[Zero__Kelvin]

Stop spreading ridiculous myths:

"Yes, that's the conventional wisdom with open-source. But tell me: when was the last time you went inspect the code deep in the kernel? "

From the latest Linux Foundation report: Kernel: 2.6.30 Number od developers: 1,150 Number of known companies: 240

3,300 eyes is a lot of eyes (apologies to any kernel devs who have lost an eye or are blind.) And that is only the count of the actual contributors. There are many more who look at it, and write code for it, that don't submit their code at all, or don't have their code accepted into the kernel proper.

Before you make such a ridiculous statement, please learn about the Linux Kernel development process. Nothing, and I mean nothing gets into the kernel without highly skilled devs reviewing it first. Sure, they could make a mistake, but saying that it might happen because nobody is really looking is ridiculous.

Re:Would probably be found

[jamiesan]

And now that they know you feel this way, they will be keeping an eye on YOU!

Re:Would probably be found

[Zero__Kelvin]

", such that when found, it could simply be labeled as a bug rather than an backdoor... plausible deniability."

That is how it would be labeled anyway. It would also be fixed immediately if at all possible. There are no special bugs in the kernel. They are all unacceptable. There is no "this bug matters and that one doesn't" mentality that is a direct result of proprietary/closed source profiteering.

Re:Would probably be found

[thoth]

By that logic, Linux developers are murderers. After all, Hans Reiser murdered his wife therefore all other kernel devs are killers?

Re:Would probably be found

[fredprado]

Most civil servants are average people no more or less "evil" than anyone else. The two main problems is that as the power accessible to them increases so increases the temptation to abuse it, and that groups usually have very different ethics than the people who constitute them do individually.

Re:Would probably be found

[DoofusOfDeath]

I think you make fair points.

Re:Would probably be found

[omnichad]

Don't worry - if you took the plastic frame off, the edge of the bolt/screw that holds the plate on has to obscure part of the plate by necessity as part of actually holding it on.

Re: Would probably be found

[tburkhol]

What god complexes people have to assume they are worthy of the NSA snooping on them. Be a good person and you have nothing to worry about. Government agencies have snooped on their citizens for decades, remember the analog phone system?

You may not have noticed, but the major change to surveillance in the past couple decades is that official interest is not longer required. Human attention is no longer required. You need not do anything to rise to "worthy" of NSA snooping: they're doing it already.

Analog phone taps are an excellent demonstration: to tap a phone, you used to have to have a lawyer draft a warrant, have a judge authorize said warrant, pay some guy to drive a over to the subject house and install a physical device on the identified wire, then pay some other guy to record and listen to any conversations. Major expenses that would only be taken if there was reasonable likelihood of getting actionable information. Today, some geek in the back room greps on a database they've already archived.

The reason they haven't come around knocking on your door isn't that you're "a good person," but just that your particular sins have not been grepped yet. You're no more than 3 steps from Aaron Alexis: know someone who knows someone; visited the same blog; bought the same brand of shoe. Enough such coincidences, and all of a sudden, you're worthy of human attention and intervention. Then, god forbid you own a pressure cooker.

It doesn't become surveillance when a human looks at the data, it's surveillance when they collect the data

Re:Would probably be found

[gottabeme]

Mod this up for truth. Linus is a tough sell; he doesn't pull anything into his tree unless it's done right (for his definition of right, which is pretty harsh).

So much false dichotomy out there:

"Look at how many people work on the kernel! If there were any backdoors, they'd be spotted."
"Yeah, but when did YOU last look at the source? When did someone last sit down and review EVERY LINE at once?"

Those standards arer arbitrary. Sure, if we had superhuman abilities and could do that, great. But as it stands, the kernel dev process is so much better than anything closed-source. It's silly to say that unless you personally review every line of the kernel, it's no more secure than Windows or OS X or whatever. That's extreme and unrealistic.

Re:Would probably be found

[ArsonSmith]

We have an entire department ~10 people devoted to reviewing open source code at our company. Mostly a cursory review with fortify and checking in on everything it reports, which admittedly isn't very robust, but I doubt we are the only ones doing similar.

Re:Would probably be found

[Deadstick]

The Windows source is open to the best coders at Microsoft, and stuff still gets by them...

Re:Would probably be found

[hebertrich]

Who does ? .. Give us names man so we can go out hit em with clue bats :)

Re:Would probably be found

[meta-monkey]

I never "trusted" windows, apple, google, or really any for-profit company, but I assumed because of their rational self-interest, they would not deliberately fuck me over in egregious ways to a third party, like a government, because the knowledge they had done so would be bad for business. So while I have always preferred free software, I would still use closed software because, meh, why not?

Since the PRISM slides, no. No. I have already or am in the process of eliminating from my life every closed platform I was using.

Except for video games. I have a computer that will boot windows for games and I own an Xbox, but that's it.

Re:Would probably be found

[10101001 10101001]

I don't personally care that much about the NSA snooping through my e-mails. But if some criminal can read them just as easily, it's a different story.

The NSA snooping through your emails is a criminal act unless, you know, they got a search warrant to search though your emails because they specifically believe your emails contain evidence of a crime and got said warrant to search said specific emails. Your comment is no different than "I have no problem with illegal aliens who are law abiding citizens." By definition, being an illegal alien is..illegal*. :) This is the same double think that you see people advocating "limited government" who also seemingly have a different idea of the word limited in "for a limited time" when it comes to copyright--although considering how they act, there's truthfully a lot of parallels in their practice.

Overall, though, no, I don't want the NSA or FBI or GCHQ or Google or anyone snooping through my email. Google's automated email scanner for presenting ads is borderline acceptable only because (1) they're pretty open about it and hence I and near everyone knows about it, (2) I can effective opt out of almost of their profiling/snooping if I so choose (email redirects to other peoples gmail accounts makes that a less than 100% true statement), and (3) it's all a very much automated process meant to maximize their profit but without any risk of jail time or other nefarious acts upon my person. But the NSA, GCHQ, etc have actively suppressed any knowledge of their snooping and without Snowden there'd still be enough room for reasonable denial, there's no reasonable standard to opt out of not sending traffic through US or UK "jurisdiction" (makes me wonder if Verizon Germany has NSA hooks too), and by their very secret nature I cannot rely upon their supposed limited scope preventing them from seeking criminal or extralegal action against me (if I boast in emails about a long history of bypassing parking violation laws, they may just leak it to the city I live in). Basically, it's entirely unacceptable on its face by most ever reasonable standard I can think of.

*Okay, this is a bit of a dicey area to be honest. There's an inherent Right to Travel. Without it, there would be no means to eat, seek shelter, etc. But nation states have long established they have a right to set standard of entry into their territory, if nothing else to exclude people they believe have or will commit criminal acts--this isn't wholly unreasonable. Having said that, most illegals are in the US illegally because the US (and most other developed countries) have decided to setup quota systems not based upon a reasonable standard of how many people they can reasonably process a year but on some vague notion of the socioeconomic impact of a lot of refugees entering the country and straining "the safety net" meant "for the citizens". Without getting into a argument of how true that statement is or how much resentment that builds from "the citizens", I'm left with the core point of what "citizen" means--a city resident. In the end, the standards of defining a person a resident is reasonably long-term occupation and for that most illegals are citizens. That the US, since its founding, and other countries wish to redefine the term as a means of control of the potential makeup of the people is disgusting to me. Never the less, even if the laws are unjust at one level, that so few illegals even attempt legitimate entry into the US leaves very little moral high ground on their part and would, if the law were just, make them equivalently guilty of a crime paramount to a fine-able misdemeanor. So, yea, still technically criminal.

Re: Would probably be found

[Peristaltic]

Be a good person and you have nothing to worry about.

A "good person" according to whom? That definition might change depending upon who is calling the shots.

The same, old, trolling bullshit that gets repeated endlessly by idiots that know that they're idiots, so they post as ACs.

Re:Would probably be found

[meta-monkey]

The worst is NASA. When they go rogue, they break the very laws of physics.

Re:Would probably be found

[Dcnjoe60]

test subjects must be faulty if they don't immediately believe the academic's interpretation of some data presented to them.

Probably the actual discovery in this experiment: There were a lot of faulty test subjects.

Actually the similar studies have been repeated numerous times with the same result, so it is unlikely to be a fault of the subjects or the methodology. What the tests do show is that information that we hold to be technical types of information we are readily willing to concede that we could be wrong. Information that we hold as a belief or ideological position, we hold on to vehemently. Technical issues responds to logic. Ideological ones are usually emotionally based and processed in a different part of the brain. Most social views including politics and religion fall into the ideological camp and is why it is very difficult to get people to change their position using logic. It's also why, things like prejudice and bigotry are so hard to eradicate, because they, too are ideological positions.

The old adage used to be to not discuss politics or religion when having company. The tests just confirm what we already knew.

Re:Would probably be found

[operagost]

No, what that study proved is that people are lied to so often, that once they form an opinion they simply refuse to believe anything new.

Re: Would probably be found

[meta-monkey]

See David A. Wheeler.

Re:Would probably be found

[DoofusOfDeath]

No, they'd only think they had, because after years of equal-opportunity feel-good hiring, the organization's average IQ has dropped considerably from the 1960's.

Re:Would probably be found

[meta-monkey]

And the sneaky code doesn't even have to be obfuscated. It could be underhanded. And that's harder to review than closed source software, which one could just consider to be very well obfuscated.

Really, I don't think you're going to find holes by looking at the source code. You're going to find holes by poking and prodding at the binaries after they're compiled. Debugging. But at least with the source code available, you can plug the holes and trace the exploits back to their contributor.

Re:Would probably be found

[operagost]

If it's legal in Arizona to have that plate frame, that police officer broke the law by pulling you over.

Re:Would probably be found

[leuk_he]

If you are talking about a thing like the scheduler, or memory allocation, yes, lots of eyes have gone over that. However there are many corners in the kernel that do not get many eyes. Are there really that many eyes on the drivers for broadcom ethernet drivers? Or complex things like the TCP/IP scheduleing...

And security researchers are looking for errors in the code. Deliberity inserted vulnerabilities might be much harder to find. Maybe they even are found, but are shot down by the maintainer that shakes his head....

Re:Would probably be found

[tlhIngan]

*If* such a mechanism was coded in, the nature of open source would mean it would be found by others.

The open source mantra, "many eyes make bugs shallow" is unfortunately false. A carefully crafted backdoor can require a LOT of work to find, and if especially well done, may require people of varying skills to actually find it.

And no, anyone worth their salt will not submit patches that contain the entire backdoor in it. There might be oddball lines that don't seem to make sense here and there, but other patches would be just as free to introduce part of the vulnerability while still being a part of the code that has to be in there.

So now you've got a backdoor that's spread out over many patches, and even better, the time between implementation and actual usage can be quite long (enough so that various parts of the backdoor may be patched out, only to be put back in as an odd edge case). Or perhaps a well calculated patch will have someone else implement a part of the changes.

Re:Would probably be found

[meta-monkey]

Thought like that make me want to work for the NSA. Imagine, writing stuff like that is your job. Sure beats what I'm doing now, hacking terrible legacy ETL systems so Giant Appliance Corp can track how effective their Wisconsin dishwasher adverts were last quarter.

Except there's the whole "doing evil" thing. If it just weren't for the evil I'd sign right up. Although they probably wouldn't take me because of my bizarre libertarian political beliefs. Oh well. Back to dishwashers...

Re:Would probably be found

[Archangel Michael]

Good people allowing bad things to happen because they believe the lies that the bad things are actually good, allowing their consciences to be eased. If you saw one thing that was evil, and did nothing, you are as complicit as the evil people the rest of us believe are running those organizations.

Liberty takes eternal vigilance. Anything less, walks us slowly down the path of tyranny. We've walked down that path so long that people crying for liberty seem like the loons while those people who are usurping liberty look like our saviors.

And the tyrants always cloak their deeds in legality.

People like you, who did nothing, saw nothing, are the ones I hate the most. You allowed evil in the false premise that it was "good" . But I understand, you were just following orders.

Re:Would probably be found

[michelcolman]

I'm Belgian

Re:Would probably be found

[Hatta]

"Criminal" means that what is done does not comply with the law and is not sanctioned by a ruling body.

I agree, but I'd add "legitimate" to the second condition. Congress does not have the authority to authorize generalized surveillance as it is specifically prohibited by the 4th amendment. Since nothing else authorizes the NSA to eavesdrop, they are commiting crimes just as surely as if I were to eavesdrop on your email.

The three branches of government are above the law by definition and necessity.

Absolutely false.

The executive branch is tasked with enforcing the law. It can only do so by means of potentially-lethal force, which is otherwise illegal

That potentially lethal force is legal because it is authorized by the Constitution which has been ratified by the people. Similarly, NSA eavesdropping is not legal because it is specifically prohibited by the very same Constitution.

There will not be any accountability for the NSA's actions

Of course not, because there is no longer any rule of law in the US.

Re:Would probably be found

[meta-monkey]

You can check the MD5 sum, but that could be compromised (either the sum itself, or your MD5 program). Google "trusting trust" and then David A. Wheeler's diverse cross compiling solution.

That gets a bit nutty, though.

To borrow a turn of phrase from Mr. Clapper, I'm guessing what you want is the least insecure system? If that's your aim, here's my guess:

First, you have to trust that it's unlikely there's an obvious backdoor visible in the source. There's not going to be a "if password='hi_from_NSA' { grantrootaccess(); }" line. It probably won't be obfuscated, either (google obfuscated C contest), because that kind of bizarre spaghetti code would attract eyes, like how using encryption flags you for closer government inspection. If it's in the code itself, it would be underhanded (google underhanded c contest), which would just look like bugs. So pick an older distro that's "stable" and has been through a lot of bug hunts.

Next, then, it really comes down to your tool chain. That's what you'll really want to start building. Probably start with hardened Gentoo, build your compilers, and then any other distro you want, cross compiled from source on your Gentoo system.

Even then, there could be underhanded code in the compiler you built to defeat such efforts, so the rabbit hole goes deeper and deeper until you're a gibbering idiot in an insane asylum. Basically, if the men in black suits want you, the men in black suits are going to get you.

Re:Would probably be found

[DoofusOfDeath]

So how big are you going to draw that circle? You're perhaps a U.S. citizen, who hasn't lead an armed revolution against the NSA. Are you and the head of the NSA equally culpable? If so, does that mean your hatred for yourself matches your hatred for Janet Neapolitano?

Or are you assuming that the U.S. government is such a small organization that someone who works in the DoD has even the slightest more ability to disrupt the NSA's spying program than you as a (I assume) citizen do?

Re:Would probably be found

[Barlo_Mung_42]

I don't think it's that people trust Windows. I think most people just don't feel the NSA cares about them personally so it's not something they need to go through the hassle of changing OSs over.

Re:Would probably be found

[phantomfive]

The 'proof' in the article was Microsoft saying it's not a problem. Please don't tell me you're stupid enough to accept that as proof.

Re:Would probably be found

[shaitand]

That isn't the same logic at all. Murder is not part of Linux development. The things the NSA employees are doing as part of their job function is illegal, thus if they are performing their job functions they are in fact criminals. Even the job functions which aren't actively committing crimes are complicit in the crimes committed by the rest so they are accomplices.

Re:Would probably be found

[Runaway1956]

"The executive branch is tasked with enforcing the law. It can only do so by means of potentially-lethal force, which is otherwise illegal"

I would argue that statement to be false as well. The "it can only do so" part of the second sentence makes it false.

Government MAY use lethal force to enforce a law - but it MAY also do so with other means.

Take the average police standoff, in which there are no hostages, and no lives at stake other than the suspect and the police. The cops MAY fire thousands of rounds into the vicinity of the suspect - OR, they MAY just wait him out.

I am not averse to using deadly force when people's lives are at stake. But, there have been a number of cases in which the cops seem to be trigger happy thugs. A recent WW2 veteran who was killed for refusing medications in a nursing home comes to mind . . .

Re:Would probably be found

[Runaway1956]

Haven't they found a cure for that?

Re:Would probably be found

[cusco]

Neighbor with a clean driving record started dating a cop's ex-wife. Within six months he had racked up enough tickets to get his license suspended.

Re:Would probably be found

[brit74]

Geez, I hate your logic. I could also say, "It is foolish to assume that the [people] are perfect angels who could never mean you any harm; this has never been true and never will be true."

Ergo: never trust anyone, including all software developers - including open source developers (stop using software) and web developers (why the heck are you on the internet, don't you know that creators of the internet, the people at your ISP, and Slashdot developers aren't "perfect angels")?

Re: Would probably be found

[Runaway1956]

"pay some guy to drive a over to the subject house and install a physical device on the identified wire"

That is almost entirely false. The physical device is located at the telephone exchange. Identify the wire at the switchboard, and tap away.

In my youth, there were still "party lines", as opposed to "private lines". Paying the dollar or two extra to get a private line didn't change a damned thing at all - you still had the very same wires, running to the very same exchange. But people on a party line could lift the phone anytime, and listen in on the neighbor's conversation. The operator at the exchange has always had that same ability.

If the cops are installing a bug on your phone, that means they want to hear what you're talking about when you are NOT ON the phone!

Re:Would probably be found

[Grishnakh]

Take the average police standoff, in which there are no hostages, and no lives at stake other than the suspect and the police. The cops MAY fire thousands of rounds into the vicinity of the suspect - OR, they MAY just wait him out.

I don't know how these things are done in your country, but here in the USA, cops always go for the "fire thousands of rounds into the vicinty of the suspect" route. With many of our cops being doped up on steroids, they don't want to bother waiting for a suspect to get tired and hungry and surrender, they'd rather get the adrenalin rush that comes from opening fire on someone.

Re:Would probably be found

[Deliveranc3]

Agreed, what we need is a rapid enforcement policy. What happens if a hash of a working kernel comes back faulty? How quickly can I escalate to have developers examine a diff of the real kernel?

Open source is better(purer) than anything else, and we need to keep it that way. I'm not particularly paranoid, but I do feel for those who are... it saddens me when something doesn't work the way it should. I know that I've lost a bit of faith in everything, that the next time something goes wrong I won't look at myself quite as closely.

I hope there's a rapid response team, this would be a good time for it as Canonicle is on top (Mint being a small derivative and Arch being for crazy people).

Re:Would probably be found

[AlphaWoIf_HK]

Why don't you try reading the comment I replied to? He suggested that it is okay for the NSA to snoop through his emails, as if one could never abuse such a power; I merely called him out for being ridiculously naive. Again, this is about giving people too much power.

Re:Would probably be found

[Anonymous Coward]

A bandit gang that leaves paved roads, safe food, vaccines, air traffic control, and public television in its wake. Beware the Sesame Street Horde!!

Re:Would probably be found

[vux984]

Do you really think that if they could do that to pretty much any American citizen that them being able to see that you forgot to declare a $5 ebay purchase for sales tax is going to make it possible when they otherwise couldn't?

Yes and no.

The mass surveillance on it's own really isn't that threatening. The secret courts, gag orders, and the elimination of full public due process is terrifying.

Its not about them being able to catch you doing some petty unremarkable crime. Its that they can ship you off to hell without having to catch you at all if they can tag your file with the right notes. And full mass surveillance makes that easy... a few out of context snips from your email and phone conversations, video clips of you walking home in an alley 'known to be a meeting place of suspected terrorists', video of you carrying a 'suspicious backpack"... a judge that rubber stamps anything that looks like its been vaguely filled out correctly... and off to hell you go. You don't get a lawyer, or a trial, and the absurdly thin evidence is never challenged in public view.

Intrusive government surveillance makes falsifying evidence a lot easier.

Re:Would probably be found

[cellocgw]

Once again, this is a possibility we've known about for a while, and it hasn't caused people to leave Windows in droves. I think it's something most people just must not care about

Which standard answer would you prefer?

A) Most people are panic-stricken at the thought of change.
B) The OS decision at our place of work is made by some C-level IT person who's clueless.
C) What compromise in trust? We'll just load up Kaspersky and AVG and Sophos and Defender...

Re:Would probably be found

[Ravaldy]

What choice do they have? I only see 2 options for PCs when I go to a store: "Apple or Windows". Most love that they can save over $200 by picking Windows. It always comes down to price and reputation. In the eyes of end users, Windows has a good reputation.

Re:Would probably be found

[mcgrew]

Just got back to Illinois
Locked the front door, oh boy.
Got to sit down and take a rest on the porch.
Imagination sets in
Pretty soon I'm singin'
"N.S.A. knockin' on my backdoor."

(apologies to Creedence)

Re:Would probably be found

[AmiMoJo]

PGP isn't going to help. If you don't already use it regularly and suddenly start it will look suspicious, and in any case they will just demand your private keys when forcing you to accept the backdoor patch. Torchat might help, but again unless you already use it regularly to communicate with other contributors it will be obvious what you are trying to do.

This is why everything needs to be encrypted all the time.

Re:Would probably be found

[HangingChad]

*If* such a mechanism was coded in, the nature of open source would mean it would be found by others

If it were built right it could be very hard to detect, even looking right at it.

Re: Would probably be found

[mythosaz]

What part of rural dumbfuckastan still has phone systems that old? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossbar_switch

Re:Would probably be found

[mythosaz]

It's a trivial easy cause to pull you over.

Once you've been pulled over, it's a new game of finding a trivial easy cause to initiate a search.

I mean, c'mon, I totally smelled a drug-like odor. Guess I was mistaken. You're free to go.... ....that is, if I didn't find anything.

Don't make this hard on yourself. It's a pain in the ass to get the drug dog over here and make pretend he gave the search signal.

Re:Would probably be found

[FrankSchwab]

How soon we forget Jose Padilla. No, he didn't go to Gitmo, but did get arrested in the US and was held in military custody for 3 years while being subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques", all because Pres. Bush called him a name - "enemy combatant". And multiple federal courts held that this was both legal and constitutional. Because the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal, this is currently the law of the land.

Re:Would probably be found

[Anonymous Coward]

"Standardized testing" does not show any difference between races that can be attributed to genetics. What it usually shows is disparities between cultures and socioeconomic groups. The problem with people who make the claim you do is that they extrapolate actual genetic differences into explaining any sort of racist thing they want to explain. And yes, "Asian people are good at math" is just as racist as "black people are the least intelligent of the races". Obviously genetic differences exist, but they're far, far more minor than people like you would have us believe and are just matters of different tradeoffs in gene expression due to historical environmental factors.

Re:Would probably be found

[Bengie]

A theoretical exploit that requires making changes to the transistor mask. Not a fly-by exploit.

Re:Would probably be found

[Archangel Michael]

that someone who works in the DoD has even the slightest more ability to disrupt the NSA's spying program than you as a (I assume) citizen do?

Snowden

Yes, someone that works in the DOD does have more power to affect change than I do as a citizen. Patriots are called criminals until they are vindicated by history. My point, when good people do nothing in the face of evil, evil triumphs. Mostly good people DO NOT want to be disruptive, which is why they are generally "good" people. The problem is, good people NEED to be disruptive to evil, even when it is personally perilous, this is true patriotism. This is not the Fox News kind of flag waving patriotism.

Re:Would probably be found

[Grishnakh]

For every article you find like that, I can find dozens and dozens showing out-of-control cops shooting people and murdering people's dogs. You're the one who's dishonest, trying to paint American cops in a favorable light when in fact they're a menace to society.

Re:Would probably be found

[jovius]

You underline a good point. The facts are mostly presented to cater the needs of the other people who care about facts. The proportion of reasonable people of all of the population has been and will be pretty much constant. Being cared about facts or thinking too much in the past or future is not evolutionary useful. The life goes on with simple mechanics...

Re:Would probably be found

[tqk]

I don't personally care that much about the NSA snooping through my e-mails. But if some criminal can read them just as easily, it's a different story.

How do you differentiate between the two?

Re:Would probably be found

[Skuld-Chan]

Windows source code is available though:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/default.aspx

Re:Would probably be found

[tqk]

The State is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large. -- Murray Rothbard

The State is the worst sort of bandit gang. Other gangs don't go around insisting on reforming morals and doing damned near anything they please in herding us like cattle, because it's what's good for us.

Re: Would probably be found

[Runaway1956]

Didn't say "still has". I said, "in my youth".

I painted the simplistic picture - but it remains true today that the cops do their phone tapping at the exchange, not at the suspect's house.

Re:Would probably be found

[steelfood]

You have to understand that the DoD is comprised of both civilians and combatants. War crimes tend to be committed by the combatants. The civilians tend to be more interested in the Defense part of the DoD than in the attack part.

The NSA/CIA/FBI do not have such a distinction. Their entire organization is comprised of combatants. You can argue about field agents versus analysts and such for the latter two, but the very purpose of the organization is to attack.

For a human body analogy, the DoD might be your skin and your digestive membranes, keeping the bad stuff out. The NSA/CIA/FBI is your immune system, attacking the bad stuff that gets in, or the stuff that turns bad. Well, they're developing into leukemia. Or maybe, you can say we had a relapse.

Re:Would probably be found

[lister king of smeg]

Windows has a good reputation

That is something I never thought I would hear someone say slashdot.

Re:Would probably be found

[tqk]

If Windows users and Linux users wanted the same things out of their operating systems all of them would be using Linux ...

Assuming Linux provided those things at least as well as Windows, of course.

It does here. A good carpenter doesn't blame his tools. If you can't make it shine, spend money. Others will.

Re: Would probably be found

[lister king of smeg]

As Thompson explains in his Reflections on trusting Trust (http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html) even if you download everything in source form, and review it, you are still susceptible to manipulation if you use the compiler binary and haven't reviewed it's source.

Or the source of the compiler compiling that compiler, and so on.

The Thompson compiler hack has always struck me a flawed as how does the compiler know what exactly it is compiling to insert the back door? If it is simply based on name of the files it is compiling then it would fail when you change the name of the program, if it was based on the code then it would fail when I compile another version of it as it would no longer match the definitions provided or depending on the changes made it would insert the backdoor but not work because the updated version is incompatible with the old exploit. So essentially the compiler would need a high degree of AI with the ability to comprehend what it was parsing and be able to dynamically write a back-door that would be compatible with what ever it is compiling and the would be no mean feat. Not only that but it would be susceptible to you simply compiling with a different compiler and diff'ing the output.

Re:Would probably be found

[timholman]

Why did you consent to the search?

An excellent question, which a lawyer friend of mine also asked me when I told her what had happened. (She said I was crazy to consent.)

I consented because I quickly realized the cop was not going to let me say, "No, you cannot search my car", and just let me drive off. He was determined to search my car. I had Arizona plates (this was in Tennessee), and apparently a lot of drugs were being transported from the Southwest into this area. I also did not have a permanent address ("No, I'm just staying with a relative") and that also set off some flags.

So I had two choices: stand up for my constitutional rights, and possibly spend another hour or two being detained and questioned using whatever excuses the cop could think of, or just let him search my car, find nothing, and let me drive off a few minutes later - which is exactly what happened.

I want to emphasize that the state trooper was unfailingly polite to me the entire time, and I to him. But he was not going to let me drive away without a fight, and I was not going to spend a few hours of my life seeing just how far he was willing to push it. You have to pick your battles in life, and I had nothing to gain by fighting this one.

Re:Would probably be found

[Muros]

That potentially lethal force is legal because it is authorized by the Constitution which has been ratified by the people.

Did you get to vote on that then?

Re:Would probably be found

[timholman]

Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal. I am not a laywer, and neither are cops. So while they can harass you their interpretation of the law doesn't necessarily hold up in court. And even then it's up to the prosecutor whether or not they want to actually pursue it.

Point taken. However, even if the charges get tossed out by a judge, or the prosecutor declines to prosecute, you've just spent a few hours of your life fighting a battle that could have been avoided. Police have the ability to your ruin your day if they so choose, even if nothing ultimately sticks in a court of law. I chose discretion over valor and avoided a pointless legal exercise that would have gained me nothing.

Re:Would probably be found

[IndustrialComplex]

Until someone needs to provide justification after the fact.

Re:Would probably be found

[David_Hart]

Windows has a good reputation

That is something I never thought I would hear someone say slashdot.

The only population where Windows has a poor reputation is with UNIX and Apple geeks (i.e. a large portion of Slashdot). If Windows was half as bad as some believe, the world would have come to a crashing halt by now. Love or hate the GUI if you want, but Windows 7/8 is a reliable OS.

Re:Would probably be found

[kiwimate]

The NSA itself is comprised of criminals. From the agent who accesses data he has no legitimate right to,

Like Edward Snowden?

Face it, whether you approve of what he did or think he was wrong, he committed a crime. Merely admitting "the NSA is a criminal organization" doesn't automatically mean it's wrong. There are many activities that have been carried out that history views as admirable which were nonetheless criminal.

Re:Would probably be found

[ducomputergeek]

Spies are nothing more than criminals with a government badge. Their job, explicitly is go and break laws.

Re:Would probably be found

[b4upoo]

You can bet that lots of OSs as well as software allow spy agencies to get inside many computers and my feeling is that it can be next to impossible to spot even in open source OSs. For example some printers have been exploited to hide viruses. You should expect professional computer spies do do a very good job of it all. The only way you have half a chance is to run computers that stand alone and are not connected to any other computer, phone lines, etc.. I would not even bet on those units not being compromised either. Who is to say that Intel or AMD has not been forced to add a little something to your CPU?

Re:Would probably be found

[wisnoskij]

If they asked him too, you can be pretty sure that he complied.

Re:Would probably be found

[atomicxblue]

As much as I disagree with some of his methods, you don't think people like RMS read every line of code before they allow it on their computer? This is the man who wgets web pages so he can read the HTML before he looks at it in a web browser. There is also a large subset of the population who monitors all traffic in and out from their computer that a backdoor would be found rather quickly, I'd think.

Re: Would probably be found

[Guy Harris]

Courts have ruled that black people are chattel, based on their reading of the Constitution. Just because some hack in a robe says it is so doesn't make it true.

Sadly, Article IV of the US Constitution, at that time, said things such as

No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.

which, while perhaps not explicitly allowing chattel slavery, at least alluded to it.

Re:Would probably be found

[mcgrew]

I keep seeing this meme more and more, and it's pure bullshit. I asked for a link once, the guy sent me to a page of stuff people got in trouble for and none of them were anything that the average person is likely to do! Illegally importing foods for a restaraunt, illegally owning dangerous animals, posession of feathers from endangered birds, stuff like that. Not normal people problems, rich people problems and weird people problems.

My day starts off with coffee and TV, drive to work, walk around the block on break, back to work, drive home for lunch stopping for beer for the evening, home for lunch, back to work, walk around the block on afternoon break, work, drive home, turn on the TV and open a beer. Get on slashdot, write in the book I'm working on, maybe walk down the street to a bar later.

Now tell me, besides the joint I lit when I got home from work, what law have I broken? Sure, a dishonest cop can pull you over and pin any kind of bullshit he wants on you (Monte Python parodied this effectively 40 years ago: "whatever did I give the Missus??" after the planted "dope" turns out to be a sandwich).

There's no possible way a NORMAL person is committing three Federal felonies a day, and there's nowhere you can point to back up that really stupid paranoid meme.

You know those little plastic frames that auto dealers put around your license plate, with the dealer's name on it? Well, as it turns out, where I live it is illegal to obscure any part of your license plate, which means that I was breaking the law by having that plastic frame overlap my plate along the edges and corners. It gave the state trooper probable cause to stop me. At least he didn't give me a ticket.

It would have cost you $40 if he had, not a stint in a federal prison. If you count jaywalking maybe the average does break the law three times a day, but most laws are minor, like traffic tickets. Nothing to be paranoid about.

Re:Would probably be found

[epyT-R]

so what? What he did was in reaction to what was done by washington. He did 'wrong' for the right reasons, unlike the fucks in washington who only do right for the wrong reasons. Quit crying about snowden. There are bigger fish to fry. Law itself has no value of those who write and enforce it don't also obey it.

Re:Would probably be found

[countach74]

It probably wasn't a valid form of probable cause. The OP probably allowed it. You have to make it very clear that you do not consent to searches or they will search. And of course it's a bad idea to let them search, as it can only harm you; they may find something from the previous owner, or whatever, that looks suspicious. Now you have something to explain/worry about, whereas if you just said "I do not consent to searches," you'd both be on your way.

Re:Would probably be found

[gl4ss]

actually it's only really open to the few guys who do the release builds.

Re:Would probably be found

[gumbi west]

whoosh on you too.

Re:Would probably be found

[gunzy83]

Your mama's research methodology is so flawed... oh wait...

Re:Would probably be found

[AlphaWoIf_HK]

How is that relevant to whether or not what he said was correct? It isn't. That said, the people directly involved with organizations that violate people's rights know more about them than the public and have more chances to act (quit, leak information, etc.). Normal people can vote accordingly to make a statement (it needn't jump straight to a revolution).

Re:Would probably be found

[gumbi west]

If Windows was half as bad as some believe, the world would have come to a crashing halt by now.

By that logic, I could conclude that Win95 was really great software.

Re:Would probably be found

[hughk]

In a commercial closed source environment, there are still likely to be far fewer eyes looking at the code. Very few people look deliberately outside their area unless a major problem comes to light (no budget to) and other teams don't like defects being raised against them from outside.

Re:Would probably be found

[Xest]

I don't think it's that, I think it's simply that most people know they're not interesting to the NSA so simply do not give a shit.

I think there's nothing more complex to it than that.

Re:Would probably be found

[Archangel Michael]

I don't for a moment believe that you'll do a damned thing.

Stop projecting your own cowardice

Re:Would probably be found

[Your.Master]

The only part of your sentence I don't understand is "No".

That doesn't seem to contradict what he said at all. It's just a proposed mechanism for why facts do not matter.

Re: Would probably be found

[Your.Master]

You're confusing "bad" with "criminal".

A thing can be criminal while not being evil, or even being outright good.

A thing can be non-criminal while still being evil.

Owning black people, historically, was not a crime. Just because it's evil doesn't make it criminal.

The discussion here is whether the NSA are *criminals* by *definition*.

Re:Would probably be found

[hackus]

it is not an issue because there is a choice to vette infrastructure.

If you want a secure system, use open source.

If you do not want a secure infrastructure use commercial security products which are specifically closed source.

You have a choice, which I think is being misconstrued as not caring.

-Hack

Re:Would probably be found

[Gripp]

We can't see the windows code. We can see the linux kernel code. That's the difference. And now that he's admitted to adding a back door, there will be plenty of people digging through the code to remove it. Whether they can check those changes back into the main repo, or have to start a whole new branch is a different issue. But regardless, it's more than we can with windows.

Re:Would probably be found

[Joining Yet Again]

When interviewing laypeople, it is your job to understand their meanings of the words, and you cannot assume that they understand your meaning.

English is not prescriptive, and jargon need not always follow meanings in general parlance. Even if neither of these things were true, assuming that everyone follows the rules would be missing the point entirely.

Re:Would probably be found

[riverat1]

And you think the same principle doesn't apply to private businesses?

Re:Would probably be found

[Reziac]

Because something is a crime doesn't automatically mean it was wrong. Many activities have been carried out that history views as criminal, which were nonetheless admirable.

Re:Would probably be found

[AlphaWoIf_HK]

Where did I say it didn't? I believe it applies to all humans. Government thugs can't be trusted, and neither can these greedy corporations or businesses; they're all pieces of trash in my eyes. It's just that these piece of trash business people don't usually have as much power as government thugs.

Re:Would probably be found

[Ravaldy]

Yeah, lets start talking about old version of anything. In the present everything old seems to be garbage. I mean damn, a rotary phone, WTF WAS THAT!

Re:Would probably be found

[Ravaldy]

Another anonymous coward. Not surprised. I mean the guy quit IT because he couldn't handle some software. What a bad attitude to have towards anything. Oh... it's too hard, I can't handle it. Life is hard in his corner of the world.

Re:Would probably be found

[Zero__Kelvin]

What you wrote has absolutely nothing to do with the subject of this thread.

Re:Would probably be found

[Keybounce]

Nothing, and I mean nothing gets into the kernel without highly skilled devs reviewing it first. Sure, they could make a mistake, but saying that it might happen because nobody is really looking is ridiculous.

The old random number generator, that I believe affected every distribution of linux.

The bugged cryptography library / key generator that shipped for over a year, that I believe affected one distribution.

There are plenty of ways that a given section of code can only be understood by just a few people. Why constant X and not Y? Why is elliptical generation this way and not that way? Why insert a shift left one bit?

Heck, a more down to earth issue: How long was it before NTFS was understood well enough to be able to write to it in every case, given some strange features that had to be "black-boxed" reversed before they were understood -- and are you sure that there is 100% compatibility today?

That's just the areas that I know about; I'm sure other people have other issues that they keep aware of.

===

A much higher level question: Why is any program allowed to use getHostByName(), struct sockaddr, or decide to open a connection to machine X on it's own, without having to go through a system policy?

That's not a silly question. Yes, I know the history -- those had to be in user code when networking was changing 6 times a year. But for at least a decade, if not more, that hasn't been the case -- and there is nothing you can do to ensure that 100% of all traffic goes out through tor, is there?

I'm not calling struct sockaddr a back door; I'm calling it a security design flaw. I'm calling the whole "no program can write to the disk without OS control, but any program can write to any place on the network without any control" a security flaw. Heck, you could argue that being able to determine your real IP address is a flaw -- even if a spy had to send it out over tor, that spy could still reveal who you were.

[FYI, the alternative would be to eliminate the distinction between a socket descriptor and a file descriptor, and have network end-points created by open("/dev/net/hostname:port", O_RDRW) or something similar.]

Re:Would probably be found

[Zero__Kelvin]

First off, I never said that there were no flaws. You don't seem to be paying attention to this thread. It is specifically about the claim that nobody is looking at the source: "Yes, that's the conventional wisdom with open-source. But tell me: when was the last time you went inspect the code deep in the kernel? How many open-source code users do you think have the time, desire and ability - and probably paranoia - to go and inspect the code in *any* open-source project of reasonable size, let alone something as complex as the kernel?"

That being said, lets look at your claims:

"The old random number generator, that I believe affected every distribution of linux."

I'd need more information to say anything about this one.

"The bugged cryptography library / key generator that shipped for over a year, that I believe affected one distribution."

... has absolutely nothing to do with the kernel.

"Heck, a more down to earth issue: How long was it before NTFS was understood well enough to be able to write to it in every case, given some strange features that had to be "black-boxed" reversed before they were understood -- and are you sure that there is 100% compatibility today?"

You could say the exact same thing about Windows NTFS implementation. How do you know, even today? Well, with Linux you have the source, but as you point out, no spec. With Windows you have neither unless you are "connected." It always makes me frustrated when Microsoft screws it up for everybody and then people blame someone other than Microsoft

". I'm calling the whole "no program can write to the disk without OS control, but any program can write to any place on the network without any control" a security flaw."

If that were true it certainly would be a security flaw. Of course, iptables solves the problem. You don't seem to understand that the kernel is part of the operating system rather than the whole OS..

' Heck, you could argue that being able to determine your real IP address is a flaw "

No. You couldn't. That is an absurd statement. That is like saying that being able to determine your current login name or the date and time is a flaw. Your claim is that if you have been cracked they can find stuff out. No kidding.

"[FYI, the alternative would be to eliminate the distinction between a socket descriptor and a file descriptor, and have network end-points created by open("/dev/net/hostname:port", O_RDRW) or something similar.]"

I recommend you post this great insight to the Linux Kernel Mailing List for feedback. Make sure you put on a flame retardant suit first though!

Re:Would probably be found

[megahurts.gr]

Expect a knock on your door shortly.

Re:Would probably be found

[romons]

According to the recent human brain study, facts do not matter. So no wonder people still believe in things like Windows (or open-source) safety and security...

This result seems obvious, given the insights into human nature provided by a recent book I just read, called The Social Conquest of Earth by E.O. Wilson. The book maintains that our need to join and protect a tribe or group is a genetic group adaptation. One example he uses is that of religion, where creation myths are believed and taught even when all evidence points to their being false. His claim is that this is an example of multilevel adaptation, where groups who were composed of individuals who 'drank the kool-aid' (my term) were more able to survive than other groups with members who were not so willing to give up personal independence.

So, according to this, republicans are a tribe, democrats are a tribe, mormons are a tribe, etc. Folks in tribes overlook inconsistencies in the core belief set of the tribe simply because pointing them out would make them stand out in the group, possibly leading to expulsion (which would have been fatal for early hominoids). So, the personal stake (adaptation at a personal level) makes them want to stay in the group, and group adaptation makes members of groups who believe the same things more likely to overcome other groups.

What is a little math when you have your survival to consider?

Re: Would probably be found

[retchdog]

it's a proof-of-concept. yes, turning arbitrary code into a full rootkit would be tricky (though i don't think it would require hard AI), but changing the code to allow a buffer overflow is notably easier.

also, the probability of two different compilers producing the same binary on anything beyond "hello, world" is practically zero.

Re:Would probably be found

[Druegan]

"That potentially lethal force is legal because it is authorized by the Constitution which has been ratified by the people."

Oh really? I've been a US Citizen since birth and nobody's ever asked me to ratify it, and the same is true for every other living person born in this nation.

The reality is, a bunch of people who have long since died and been buried ratified the Constitution, and the consent of everybody who has come after them has simply been taken for granted by the state due to their peculiar geographic accidents of birth.

Not saying that the Constitution is a bad document, just saying that if the goal is to enfranchise citizenry, starting off with the assumption that a bunch of old guys who have long since become worm food were somehow "Magical Priests Guarding the Font of Wisdom" to such an extent that the Social Contract doesn't need to be renewed in subsequent generations is probably not the best way to go about it.

Re:Would probably be found

[MichaelSprague]

Do people trust Windows? Or, do they not know any better than to trust Windows?

I expect most people never have to worry about trust issues and leave that worrying up to the company. Trusting Windows doesn't seem so foolish any more, by comparison.

I only use Windows when I have to, either for an app, or because it is what the office uses, but that doesn't mean I "trust Windows." It means I want to play this game or take home a paycheck.

Re:Would probably be found

[rtb61]

Nope a public back door in Linux would be proof of the value of Linux. Remember there have been many commercial contribution to Linux, there in fact Have been contributions by the NSA. Finding a back door in Linux would be proof of the value of Linux. Anyone who refused to remove that discovered back door of course would burn all their trust and by publicly derided by the whole community. Back doors are not the problem, back doors that you can not lock or remove are the problem.

Any country that wanted to subvert Linux would have the problem of subverting their own system or keeping those systems clean and enabling others to do a quick comparison and find the difference.

Re:Would probably be found

[rastos1]

3,300 eyes is a lot of eyes

1.1 million of lines in 27900 files is a lot too. The point is that there are many developers that touch only small part of the kernel. And that small part is touched by only a small number of developers.

Re:Would probably be found

[Zero__Kelvin]

There may be 27,900 lines of code but almost all of those lines of code were written years ago and have been tested hundreds of thousands times over. Each of them has been seen by far, far, far, more than 3300 eyes. The Linux Kernel is in use in literally millions of systems on more than 30 hardware architectures,and thousands of hardware platforms. The total number of lines of code has nothing to do with it. I do however like to encourage people to learn new things, so: Good luck learning about software development!

Shaking?

[Anonymous Coward]

We nod our heads for yes and shake them for no.

Re:Shaking?

[Pikewake]

Unless you're in Albania, Bulgaria or Macedonia ;)

Re:Shaking?

[waitamin]

This is so weird to most Europeans and Americans.... A common question by American teachers in my high-school in Bulgaria was, "does it make sense", usually followed by about half the people shaking their heads and half the people nodding, to the obvious (yet silent) horror of the teacher. They got used to it eventually.

What is best however is the never-ending rotational head movement that some people from the Indian subcontinent use.

Re:Shaking?

[rvw]

We nod our heads for yes and shake them for no.

Yeah those Finnish people. It must be the Vodka!

Re:Shaking?

[Camembert]

What is best however is the never-ending rotational head movement that some people from the Indian subcontinent use.

Yes indeed, i t is initially very puzzling.
Eventually I learned that it does not mean yes or no or maybe; but simply "I understand you" (this does not imply agreement).

Re:Shaking?

[fonske]

My Bulgarian Karate teacher has spent years in the USA and now lives in Belgium.
When he visits his mother in Sofia he rotates his head when saying yes or no, having difficulty of conforming to two different sets of agreement.

Re:Shaking?

[cbope]

Nope, it's the kossu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kossu

Details of the backdoor

[aneroid]

'linus' is an alias for 'root' on all systems running the kernel since Windo...err, Linux 3.11.
Password for said alias is 'root' (some of the backdoor-accessing programs don't accept blank passwords).

Never know, since it's not possible to look for such backdoors, unless it's open source.

And even IF it was, you'd have to worry about Trusting Trust.

(mostly sarcasm.)

No

[thegarbz]

*If* such a mechanism was coded in, the nature of open source would mean it would be found by others.

The nature of open source means it MAY be found by others. Sure you have a higher chance and an audit trail but you're making multiple assumptions here:

a) The code will be audited, and while this is true for the Linux kernel it may not be true for *insert small open source project with few developers here*.
b) You're relying on the audit to look in the right place, i.e. it's one thing to compromise the Linux network stack, and quite another to compromise *insert convoluted X11 protocol no one has touched in years here*.
c) You're relying on the fact the auditors can actually identify the fault in the code. Given that a backdoor can be inserted as easily as putting a = sign where an == sign belongs and given the quality of entries in the Underhanded C Contest I would say that not nearly every coder is competent at identifying nefarious code. Not to mention the number of exploitable bugs that exist at large.
d) You're assuming the source code matches the binaries, and while people may be routinely looking at your code, the vast majority of projects not built from source are NOT decompiled and checked against their source to see if someone hasn't tainted the binaries.

Having auditable code does not magically make you safe.

Re:No

[sjames]

It makes you safER. One thing I can be sure of is that proprietary code has not been examined by anyone not on the payroll and/or under a gag order.

Re:No

[silentcoder]

Well... a is a bit of a red herring, if it's such a small project, then it's also got fewer users, making it by definition less of a risk since attacking small niche groups have a very low return on investment.

Finding a bug/backdoor and using it takes time and effort - therefore it's logical to target things with large numbers of uses to maximize yield.
For mass surveilance, putting a back door in a program for butterfly-collectors isn't worth it - because there just aren't enough butterfly-collectors to get any useful results.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Incorrect.

Read this (it's old but still applies):

http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/5/5263/1.html

From the article:

But according to two witnesses attending the conference, even Microsoft's top crypto programmers were astonished to learn that the version of ADVAPI.DLL shipping with Windows 2000 contains not two, but three keys. Brian LaMachia, head of CAPI development at Microsoft was "stunned" to learn of these discoveries, by outsiders. The latest discovery by Dr van Someren is based on advanced search methods which test and report on the "entropy" of programming code.

Within the Microsoft organisation, access to Windows source code is said to be highly compartmentalized, making it easy for modifications to be inserted without the knowledge of even the respective product managers.

Researchers are divided about whether the NSA key could be intended to let US government users of Windows run classified cryptosystems on their machines or whether it is intended to open up anyone's and everyone's Windows computer to intelligence gathering techniques deployed by NSA's burgeoning corps of "information warriors".

According to Fernandez of Cryptonym, the result of having the secret key inside your Windows operating system "is that it is tremendously easier for the NSA to load unauthorized security services on all copies of Microsoft Windows, and once these security services are loaded, they can effectively compromise your entire operating system". The NSA key is contained inside all versions of Windows from Windows 95 OSR2 onwards.

Re:No

[Zero__Kelvin]

"d) You're assuming the source code matches the binaries, and while people may be routinely looking at your code, the vast majority of projects not built from source are NOT decompiled and checked against their source to see if someone hasn't tainted the binaries."

Thanks for the laugh! A) All projects are built from source. B) You can't "decompile and check against the source". It always cheers me up when I see someone presenting themselves as quite competent and knowing what is going on, and then stepping in it so deeply that people can smell the stink for miles around ;-)

Re:No

[thegarbz]

No you can't check it against the source. You can do some analysis to ensure the program does the same thing as the source when decompiled. This is something done quite extensively when hacking and reverse engineering code.

Since we're talking about all projects being build from the source... I don't think I've ever downloaded any source or built anything. Same goes for most people who don't use Gentoo. I do however recall plenty of stories where some project website got hacked and as a precaution they emailed the mailing list to reinstall everything from a new set of binaries since the existing ones may be compromised.

I really enjoy getting "corrected" by people like you. Today has been a good day.

Re:No

[thegarbz]

No argument there. I fully agree.

Re:No

[Zero__Kelvin]

" the vast majority of projects not built from source are NOT decompiled and checked against their source "

"No you can't check it against the source."

Flip flop much?

". You can do some analysis to ensure the program does the same thing as the source when decompiled. This is something done quite extensively when hacking and reverse engineering code."

I have been doing reverse engineering since at least a twenty years before you created a SlashID. Trust me when I tell you that you have no idea what you are talking about

" I don't think I've ever downloaded any source or built anything. Same goes for most people who don't use Gentoo."

Being able to write the word Gentoo isn't the same as understanding what it means. There is no fundamental difference here. The purpose for building the package on the target machine is for optimization. You get the source from a repo just the same. The only defense against an attack like the one you describe is the exact same defense. There is no extra advantage from a security standpoint. People installing Gentoo aren't inspecting the source before they do a portage based package install.

"I really enjoy getting "corrected" by people like you. Today has been a good day."

You should enjoy being corrected by people who actually know what they are talking about when you start spewing ridiculous nonsense that makes it clear that you don't. Used wisely, it can help you stop looking foolish. Of course that is just a theory. In practice it hasn't happened yet.

Re:No

[thegarbz]

The only thing I'm really failing to understand is if you're being purposefully dense or just trying to defend your earlier comment and digging a hole in the process.

I haven't flip-flopped, this is just your amazing ability to read a sentence without reading it in context of the paragraph. Here's a little hint for someone who should know something that's he's apparently been doing for 20 years. You CAN decompile binary code. You CAN see what the binary code is doing. You CAN compare what it is doing to what it's supposed to be doing. This being one of the fundamental principles of reverse engineering maybe you should find a different day job.

I used Gentoo as an example of a system which fetches the source code and then compiles it. I.e. you CAN read what it's going to do, run it through a compiler and then know what it's going to do. Whether people actually do it is irrelevant. This is quite a bit different from people say on Ubuntu who will download a binary package which you have to take 100% on faith that it does what it should as described in the source code. Or you have to jump through the incredible hoops above to verify. Or you have go download from source and compile which the premise of this discussion stated doesn't get done in most Linux distributions.

Don't bother replying. I've a minimum intelligence standard to uphold when trying to have a conversation and I feel stupider this morning for having to read your absurd drivel, and won't be fooled into thinking you know what you're talking about again. Good-day.

Re:No

[Zero__Kelvin]

" I feel stupider this morning for having to read your absurd drivel"

Right feeling; wrong reason.

Some people ...

[daveime]

... can't tell the difference between humour and reality.

Torvalds said no while nodding his head yes is a JOKE people, not a fucking admission. Please, save the tinfoil paranoia for Reddit, and keep the serious tech discussions here.

Re:Some people ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... can't tell the difference between humour and reality.
Torvalds said no while nodding his head yes is a JOKE people, not a fucking admission. Please, save the tinfoil paranoia for Reddit, and keep the serious tech discussions here.

I don't know if you've been following the news lately, but when it comes to backdoors a lot of the "tinful paranoia" of years past has turned out to actually be true. Statistically speaking it is no longer such a certainty that it's just paranoia anymore. The true tinfoil cynic might say that agencies like the NSA are actually depending on "serious tech people" discounting stuff like this as tinfoil paranoia.

Re:Some people ...

[AHuxley]

The only question now is the nature of the tinfoil layers needed.
Was it tracking a user over a network?
Was it more a permission, checksum and no log files methods?
Was it on going help with long term decryption?
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/nsa-taps-skype-chats-newly-published-snowden-leaks-confirm/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/06/can-apple-read-your-imessages-ars-deciphers-end-to-end-crypto-claims/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/09/new-york-times-provides-new-details-about-nsa-backdoor-in-crypto-spec/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/09/nsa-attains-the-holy-grail-of-spying-decodes-vast-swaths-of-internet-traffic/

Re:Some people ...

[c0lo]

... can't tell the difference between humour and reality.

I can't.

Torvalds said no while nodding his head yes is a JOKE people, not a fucking admission. Please, save the tinfoil paranoia for Reddit, and keep the serious tech discussions here.

Unless I'm reading Linus'es admission of a joke, I will continue to be unable to tell the difference... if it's indeed a pure joke, I don't get it.
That may make me "humor impaired", but since when being so is a symptom of paranoia?

Re:Some people ...

[oji-sama]

the audience broke into spontaneous laughter.

Yes, I would go with the audience reading the non-verbal clues pretty accurately. I doubt that he would joke about it if it was true.

Re:Some people ...

[trewornan]

Many a true word is spoken in jest.

Re: Some people ...

[eric31415927]

The (negative) effectiveness of tinfoil hats may surprise you
http://projects.csail.mit.edu/gsb/archives/gsb-msg00128.html

Re:Some people ...

[gsslay]

Ahh, but if you RTFA, you'll see he did not nod his head yes. He shook his head yes, which I didn't know was even possible.

It's probably a secret Illuminati signal.

Re:Some people ...

[tgd]

... can't tell the difference between humour and reality.

Torvalds said no while nodding his head yes is a JOKE people, not a fucking admission. Please, save the tinfoil paranoia for Reddit, and keep the serious tech discussions here.

If you think tinfoil paranoia is a Reddit thing and not a Slashdot thing, you haven't spent much time here, or there. Are there subreddits with people as seething with zealotry as Slashdot? Sure... but they're easy to avoid.

(And, its an obvious joke to anyone who isn't fairly far down the autism spectrum or a tinfoil whackjob... unfortunately /. has plenty of both.)

Re:Some people ...

[Lithdren]

That may make me "humor impaired", but since when being so is a symptom of paranoia?

It isn't, but it is a symptom of the mind-reading beam they're firing into your head.

Re:Some people ...

[a_n_d_e_r_s]

Its definitly a joke. Its a very typical Linus joke.

As everyone know the US goverment has created laws that forbid anyone to publicly admit that they inserted backdoors into the code.

Sadly the slashdot editors aint too knowledgeable today so they actually accepted this so called "news" story.

Re:Some people ...

[LaminatorX]

Well, you could never be sure of a negative. Sadly though, we now have no doubt whatsoever that there are secret proceedings issuing secret rulings. :(

Re:Some people ...

[macbeth66]

As everyone know the US goverment has created laws that forbid anyone to publicly admit that they inserted backdoors into the code.

Could I get a citation please.

Re:Some people ...

[intermodal]

Comedians are the closest we have today to philosophers. They are the only group who can speak openly and honestly on basically any topic they choose, the only caveat is that at some point, they have to attempt to add a punchline. Preferrably multiple throughout.

Re:Some people ...

[HalAtWork]

What are you, an idiot? Of course some people would take this seriously, the NSA's corruption is no joke. Stop pretending yours is the only point of view.

Re:Some people ...

[kintamanimatt]

They're called National Security Letters.

Re:Some people ...

[wisnoskij]

But if he had actually been contacted by the authorities the answer would of simply been "NO", as nodding his head at that moment would of meant going to jail, if not worse.

Re:Some people ...

[someSnarkyBastard]

No. Those laws are secret.

No, it might not

[bitbucketeer]

Reflections on Trusting Trust

Re:No, it might not

[Weezul]

Thwarted Linux backdoor hints at smarter hacks (2003)
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/7388
Apparently it exploited the = vs == distinction in C. Just imagine how easily you could hide a backdoor in C++ or Java though with all the overloading!

Recent post-Snowden discussion : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6410779

The Pragmatics of the Truth

[Zanadou]

One question he was asked was whether a government agency had ever asked about inserting a back-door into Linux. Torvalds responded 'no' while shaking his head 'yes,'

That's actually quite a cunning answer: possibly, regardless of his answer to the back-door request (I hope the answer was something like "No, fuck you"), like others in comparable situations have hinted at, maybe he's being held accountable to some kind of on-going government "Non-disclosure clause" concerning such a request/conversation.

But can body language and gestures be held up to the same legal gagging? I'm sure no legal precedent been held for that yet, and Linus probably is aware of that.

A cunning, cunning way of answering the question.

Re:The Pragmatics of the Truth

[Anonymous Coward]

If you'd actually watch the video (YT: /watch?v=84Sx0E13gAo&t=1455) you'd see that after the yes/no gesture, he gave a relaxed smile and just shook his head and said "no." As in "No, I was just being funny." He wasn't being cunning, and he wasn't skirting legal precedent; he was just being Linus.

Tejun Heo's answer was actually the one to worry about: "Not that I can talk about." But I'm sure he was kidding, too.

I think the US government is collectively smart enough to know that any kernel-level "backdoor" would be quickly detected.

Umm... read between the lines?

[Anonymous Coward]

'I don't see any project coming along being more interesting to me than Linux,' Torvalds said. 'I couldn't imagine filling the void in my life if I didn't have Linux.'"

Isn't it the nature of the US govt to arrest (without means to defend) anyone who does not comply with their (illegal) demands?

If Linus was threatened with his removal from Linux...permanently... and he can't imagine life without Linux.... isn't it time for some serious independent kernel reviews?

Re:Umm... read between the lines?

[AdamColley]

No.

Re:Umm... read between the lines?

[jones_supa]

Hmm, that's a cool log actually. I browsed that a bit and there's a funny patch where someone corrects typos of HDMI being written "HMDI".

Re:Umm... read between the lines?

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

The Torvalds would likely move back to Finland if the US government attempted to force Linus to compromise his OS. The real question is whether he'd be wise enough to tell the NSA he'd "work on it" and get his family out ASAP (then tell the world what happened once safely out of their reach), or if he'd openly refuse and wind up stranded here on the no-fly list.

Re:Umm... read between the lines?

[jones_supa]

Ha!

Slip the backdoor into a precompiled GCC instead

[GauteL]

Seems we need reminding of this classic by Ken Thompson.

Slip a backdoor into a RHEL 6.x (or any other major Linux distribution) version of GCC and make it do two major things:
1. Slip a backdoor into any Linux kernel it compiles.
2. Replicate itself in any version of GCC it compiles.

Choose some entry point which changes very rarely so the chances of incompatibility with new code is small.

This would probably keep RHEL with any kernel version tainted for generations of releases without very little chance of being spotted, because there are no changes in the distributed source code of either project

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Not necessarily

[elucido]

it depends on how it's coded. It's possible to code it in such a way that it's impossible to find by anyone but the person coding it. You gotta trust your programmer as much as you trust your doctor.

Re:Not necessarily

[donaldm]

it depends on how it's coded. It's possible to code it in such a way that it's impossible to find by anyone but the person coding it. You gotta trust your programmer as much as you trust your doctor.

What you have said is true however it is not that difficult to actually determine what data goes in and out of a binary. Of course once the suspect flag has been raised there are many IT professionals who would take great delight in analysing that software.

Re:Slip the backdoor into a precompiled GCC instea

[elucido]

Seems we need reminding of this classic by Ken Thompson.

Slip a backdoor into a RHEL 6.x (or any other major Linux distribution) version of GCC and make it do two major things:
1. Slip a backdoor into any Linux kernel it compiles.
2. Replicate itself in any version of GCC it compiles.

Choose some entry point which changes very rarely so the chances of incompatibility with new code is small.

This would probably keep RHEL with any kernel version tainted for generations of releases without very little chance of being spotted, because there are no changes in the distributed source code of either project

Or bugs in the random number generator.

Expect to be deported

[HansKloss]

Now Linus can expect visit from the current regime security forces. Many people in the U.S was treated this way. No matter if they had bank accounts, 401K, houses, they were put on the plane and sent home.
When I think about it's not only government forces behaving this way. There are stories about hospitals shipping immigrant patients to the country of their birth.
Imagine when you wake up in some foreign hospital after living in US for 30 years.

Re:Expect to be deported

[Nutria]

No matter if they had bank accounts, 401K, houses, they were put on the plane and sent home.

Right. Because somewhere else is their home, and they're here illegally (whether by crossing the southern border or overstaying a visa).

If they really want to be here, there are multiple well-defined sets of rules which hundreds of thousands of people use every year to get here legally,

Re:Expect to be deported

[we3]

Thats crazy talk. No hospital would deport a patient with means to pay for his own care. Now, if he can't pay...

If it makes you feel better, maybe the hospital wasn't planing on them waking up?

Re:Expect to be deported

[HansKloss]

I know, in the U.S.A healthcare is just another business. No profit, no care.

New Jersey hospital deports unconscious stroke victim
http://rt.com/usa/jersey-hospital-deport-stroke-282/

Report: U.S. hospitals deported hundreds of immigrants
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-204_162-57580905/report-u.s-hospitals-deported-hundreds-of-immigrants/

Re:Expect to be deported

[HansKloss]

I noticed that talk, especially in the South.
People would no longer say "We don't like people from Central America or south of our border"
Instead they say "we don't like illegals" "illegals go home"

One word and makes such a difference. No longer racist.

Re:Expect to be deported

[Nutria]

One word and makes such a difference. No longer racist.

Because.... it's not racist to want some for whom it's not legal to be here to, well, not be here.

Re:Expect to be deported

[Bengie]

According to those publications, the law states the Hospital must have consent. The fact that at at least one case they claimed to have but actually did not, means the hospital is lying to skirt the law.

But no, it is not legal for a hospital to just deport someone, even if they're here illegally and have no money.

Yes

[FatLittleMonkey]

The nature of open source means it MAY be found by others. Sure you have a higher chance and an audit trail but you're making multiple assumptions here:

The difference is that with a closed source OS, if the other devs with access to the code find the backdoor, they can be ordered by the company to STFU or lose their jobs. The NSA only needs to compromise (either legally or illegally) the head of the company and that also gets them every single dev with access to the source.

There's no way for even Linus at his most shouty to completely control what other Linux devs discover. (And, as the previous poster noted, that makes it easy for Linus to tip off another dev on the sly to publicly "discover" and patch the "bug", without exposing Linus to legal issues from not cooperating with the NSA.)

Given the difference between "effortless to compromise" and "insanely difficult to compromise", which would you pick as the safest?

Re:Yes

[AmiMoJo]

The difference is that with a closed source OS, if the other devs with access to the code find the backdoor, they can be ordered by the company to STFU or lose their jobs.

I doubt any spy agency would rely on that. People leave companies all the time, and even if they did just decide to go public and accept being fired they would almost certainly find another job very quickly thanks to the publicity. They could always leak it anonymously too.

Then again the NSA was dumb enough to employ contractors like Snowden and hope that none of them ever had a conscience, so who knows.

Re:Yes

[steelfood]

The most significant difference is that with Linux, other governments can task their own sigint people to go through the source code and submit fixes. Since every government has eyes on it, any hole gets discovered fairly quickly. One government might be stupid enough to try to add security holes, but then that person would be outed as an agent pretty quickly.

Now, if all the governments were collaborating and keeping the 0-days they discover secret from the rest of the public, that'd be one thing. But I'm fairly certain that some non-trivial amount of governments (*ahem* continental Europe *ahem*) wouldn't be party to this, and that would be sufficient to neuter any such efforts.

No, the Linux kernel itself is probably not compromised. It's too much trouble. Intel and other chip makers are though. Maybe even some of the distros and distro maintainers. Path of least resistance.

Re:Yes

[thegarbz]

The nature of open source means it MAY be found by others. Sure you have a higher chance and an audit trail but you're making multiple assumptions here:

The difference is that with a closed source OS, if the other devs with access to the code find the backdoor, they can be ordered by the company to STFU or lose their jobs. The NSA only needs to compromise (either legally or illegally) the head of the company and that also gets them every single dev with access to the source.

There's no way for even Linus at his most shouty to completely control what other Linux devs discover. (And, as the previous poster noted, that makes it easy for Linus to tip off another dev on the sly to publicly "discover" and patch the "bug", without exposing Linus to legal issues from not cooperating with the NSA.)

Given the difference between "effortless to compromise" and "insanely difficult to compromise", which would you pick as the safest?

That isn't even a topic up for debate. Of course open source is better. I'm just calling out this constant ridiculous statement that the nature of open source magically makes it safe from back doors. The reality is a back door only MAY be discovered. There's no certainty.

Is it better than closed source? Undoubtedly.
Is it completely impervious to nefarious coders? Hell no.

The second, most important, question is missing

[m.alessandrini]

Did he comply? We've seen that NSA has pretty solid arguments to force people.

Re:Slip the backdoor into a precompiled GCC instea

[jones_supa]

I wonder if anyone actually takes the responsibility to do this check. Maybe there are GCC binaries in the wild which replicate a backdoor.

Re:Slip the backdoor into a precompiled GCC instea

[AHuxley]

Random number generator would be the way to go on some projects. Would the users and devs pick it up in time, over time? Be activity looking for an issue like that?

Do they track each others kernels?

[Per Abrahamsen]

I wonder if anonical, SuSE and RH track each others kernels, perhaps to see what the competition is up to, ensure compatibility, and lift useful additions. If so, they would be in a good position to catch suspicious developments, and would have motivation to make it public.

Insert anal joke here:

[Nikhil_Mahajan]

Or would that be too childish

if Linux was asked, the MS were asked

[Anonymous Coward]

If the Govenrment asked for Linux, then certainly they asked for Windows, and whereas I trust Torvalds, I don't trust Microsoft - not in a nasty way, just in the sense that they're a very large company over whom the Government has a great deal of power and where very large companies typically are not morally motivated. I don't mean that in a nasty sense, I just mean there's so many people, taking a moral stance - e.g. accepting a cost for a benefit you personally do not see - is in practical terms very, very unlikely.

So I think I have to assume there is a backdoor in Windows. In fact, it's hard to imagine anything anyone could say to reassure me. If the NSA said it was not so, I'd laugh. They twist words with the pure purpose of deception. If MS said so, I'd be thinking they were legally compelled, such that they could not even say that uch a request had occurred. The NSA surely now have a problem, in that I absolutely cannot trust their word - and indeed I cannot see how that trust can be re-established. If there was a full disclosure, that would be a start, followed by a credible reform programme. I don't think either even remotely likely; and by that, I rather think the NSA has either sealed its doom, or *our* doom. The NSA has gone too far. Either they will be replaced, in which case the problem is addressed, or, if they are not replaced, then *we* have a problem, because the NSA is too powerful to remove (and violates all privacy and security).

So, what do you know? turns out this *will* hurt MS sales, because now I *have* to move to Linux. I've been thinking about it for a while, but the cost of learning a new system to do only exactly what you can do already means where I'm very busy, it hasn't happened; but now there is a *need* for me to do, privacy.

Re:if Linux was asked, the MS were asked

[Talar]

Either they will be replaced, in which case the problem is addressed

Depends on how and by who they were replaced I would say. If things get too bad a name change and a some $$$ into a propaganda campaign about the "new NSA" could probably get them by on trustworthiness in the eyes of the general public. At least until the next whistleblower.

Re:if Linux was asked, the MS were asked

[MickLinux]

One goto guy for this one is Steve Gibson (GRC.com) of "click of death" fame. And yes, he has in the past found backdoors in Windows. Probably not intentional, but -- one of the backdoors would allow a malformed URL to delete whole directories.

Minor inconvenience, that. Unless it's major.

But he's big into the security scene.

Re:if Linux was asked, the MS were asked

[crtreece]

I've bounced back and forth between various flavors of Linux and Free BSD for the last 15 years. I'm now looking at moving to Open BSD.

All the ranting of Theo de Raadt doesn't seem so paranoid anymore.

Re: if Linux was asked, the MS were asked

[psy0rz]

I think its called the Windows updater...

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

The remark: "I couldn't imagine filling the void in my life if I didn't have Linux." is Linus telling us: "They threatened to take Linux away from me so I complied with their demands."?

Re:So...

[Wonko the Sane]

That sounds like a reasonable interpretation.

Re:So...

[RDW]

The remark: "I couldn't imagine filling the void in my life if I didn't have Linux." is Linus telling us: "They threatened to take Linux away from me so I complied with their demands."?

No, he compiled without their demands.

Re:So...

[PhilHibbs]

The remark: "I couldn't imagine filling the void in my life if I didn't have Linux." is Linus telling us: "They threatened to take Linux away from me so I complied with their demands."?

How would they do that? The could take Linus away from Linux ("disappear" him), but the other way around would be difficult. And I think people would start to ask questions if Linus disappeared into a black van.

I couldn't imagine filling the void in my life if

[TheGratefulNet]

yeah, he's a "char star" alright. yup.

if you have char-stars you don't care about voids, really.

Kernel work is government work for engineers

[nukem996]

The kernel of any operating system serves software in the same way governments serve the people. Its taking the politcs out of government. The goal is to make the best system which fairly distributes its resources amounst its users/people most efficiantly so that they maximize their utilization. At the same time it is secure enough to withstand unruly users/citizens and out side agressors.

Re:Slip the backdoor into a precompiled GCC instea

[rhysweatherley]

I wonder if anyone actually takes the responsibility to do this check. Maybe there are GCC binaries in the wild which replicate a backdoor.

Even if there were, you need only recompile your gcc source with llvm, icc, visual studio, or basically anything that isn't gcc to get a new compiler that won't replicate the backdoor any more. For extra fun, randomise the order of this compiling that compiling something else so that even backdoor reinsertions that cross the vendor boundary will eventually fail. Or write your own C++ interpreter in Python/Perl/whatever and use it to (very slowly) run gcc on itself - even if it takes a week you'll have a clean binary at the end. Yes, hiding such a backdoor seems scary to the untrained eye. It's also trivial to get rid of if you're paranoid enough to care.

Are you fine with China getting in and snooping?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about just the UK and France? Both have a "special relationship" with the USA, so can easily be getting the same information on how to snoop on your stuff as the NSA do.

So are you fine with the UK government, a foreighn power, snooping through your e-mails?

No?

THEN WHY THE FUCK IS IT OK FOR THE NSA TO SNOOP THROUGH MINE?

Morons.

You even say of your spying agencies "Well, I expect the agency to be spying on foreigners, but NOT to spy on me!!!". Except where they're spying on you, in which case "It's OK for them to spy on me".

Re:Slip the backdoor into a precompiled GCC instea

[PhilHibbs]

Seems we need reminding of this classic by Ken Thompson... there are no changes in the distributed source code of either project

Someone would have found it with a debugger. Sure, they could change the compiler to insert code into a debugger to hide the patch. But this rapidly gets so complex and error-prone that the bloat would be noticed and it would fail to spot all debuggers and patch them all. It's an interesting theoretical attack, but not practical in the long run.

Re:Slip the backdoor into a precompiled GCC instea

[Bert64]

Use gcc to compile clang..
Use clang to recompile gcc..
Add more compilers to the mix..
The more you do this, the greater the chance of an incompatibility with the backdoor code either resulting in it being removed, or causing unexpected and easily noticed problems.

less naive speculation on /. please

[Anonymous Coward]

If you were asking for a backdoor, and you happened to be a humongous security agency, wouldn't YOU have a lock put on that door? Stop underestimating NSA - you propagate lots of stupid speculation with immature assumptions like this.

Re:less naive speculation on /. please

[gaudior]

Stop underestimating NSA

Stop underestimating the tech-savvy criminals; many of them are far more skilled than any thug who works for the NSA.

Many of them ARE the thugs working for the NSA. This includes, potentially, some of you slashdotters.

I've resisted

[mynamestolen]

jumping on the bandwagon of attacking Linus. But now I have to worry. Anyone who says he doesn't know how he'd survive emotionally without his pet project is a worry. He speaks of the project as a teenager might speak about their first love. It means he might put his emotions ahead of the good of the project. I know many will respond "yeah we knew that", but I think this statement is the perhaps the best evidence yet that they might be right.

L0sers

[Anonymous Coward]

I just watched the interview on YouTube.
Linus DOES NOT admit he has ever been approached to put in a backdoor. He just makes a joke as his final "no"-statement implies.
This is lousy Twitter-filling populistic media.

Love him or hate him

[MrKaos]

He's been really successful at doing what he loves to do, which is an acheivement in itself.

Re:I couldn't imagine filling the void in my life

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate people who use char * instead of void * for things like generic buffer handling (e.g. myread()).

Backdoors...

[fabrica64]

Why bother asking Linus to put a backdoor in Linux when it's just easier to ask Intel putting a backdoor in their processors?

Re:Well, did he do it?

[Ash Vince]

Who cares if he got asked. I can ask for a lot of things too, but what I actually get is what matters. What did the government get?

Probably a rude explanation about why they know fuck all about how kernel development works :)

Look, first, to the boot time device drivers

[eer]

Worrying about compromise of the Linux or Windows kernel is foolish - they're so large, they could have anything hidden inside and you'd never find it (searching for such is literally uncomputable). Begin your concerns with the device drivers from who knows where that are put into place by your motherboard BIOS or EFI boot systems. Conventional operating systems are entirely dependent on them, and they're completely beyond your ability to inspect or trust. And the Open Source variations have the same issue as the operating systems - large, monolithic blocks of code impenetrable to analysis.

You fear what you know about. Fear, instead, what you don't.

Re:Look, first, to the boot time device drivers

[Waikido]

If they're completely beyond my ability to inspect, how exactly am I supposed to look at them?

You fear what you know about. Fear, instead, what you don't.

Now that has to go in the next Star Wars movie. Perfect for Yoda.

Re:Look, first, to the boot time device drivers

[Lumpy]

do you know what a Car bomb looks like and how to inspect for one?
If not then why do you trust your car to not explode every time you start it?

Re:Look, first, to the boot time device drivers

[Waikido]

Interesting comparison. Imagine an agency that has planted car bombs in every car. We're all at the mercy of a handful (about 850,000?) contractors who have the necessary access. Not unlike the current situation. We have no choice but to start the car.

Re:Look, first, to the boot time device drivers

[Lumpy]

Actually you could walk instead of taking the car. you always have options.

Re:Look, first, to the boot time device drivers

[eer]

It's the device drivers IN the motherboard I'm talking about - they constitute a huge block of code, supplied by who knows whom from who knows where that make up the BIOS and EFI bootstrap framework. They're what inform your OS kernel what devices are present, their characteristics, and in many instances provide standardized interfaces to them that the OS drivers themselves can simply invoke.

They operate BELOW the OS layer.

Check out the OpenFirmware.info community for more details, and know the motherboards you buy and use have them, too.

Wrong question

[Waikido]

Though backdoors are an issue, the bigger issue recently is still mass surveillance. Backdoors are probably unnecessary for most software, given the multitude of security issues and the complexity of programming. Well-funded organizations and devoted hackers will always be able to get into your pc and mailbox.

We should still try to make that hard. However, we should try much harder to avoid mass surveillance.

Re:Slip the backdoor into a precompiled GCC instea

[GauteL]

Someone would have found it with a debugger. Sure, they could change the compiler to insert code into a debugger to hide the patch. But this rapidly gets so complex and error-prone that the bloat would be noticed and it would fail to spot all debuggers and patch them all. It's an interesting theoretical attack, but not practical in the long run.

Not at all. You only apply the "patch" when debugging symbols are off and optimisation is on, which would cover nearly any production build. Even if you left in debugging symbols, you would still have a hard time discovering it with a debugger since optimisation is supposed do change the output.

You would also make it trigger under very special circumstances and as others have pointed out, the error you introduce could be a subtle change of behaviour of the random number generator.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

judges are pissed NSA lied to get their okay

[raymorris]

Judges have ruled that the NSA could do these things - when the NSA lied to the judges about what they were doing and how. Some of those judges are pretty pisses off now that they know how the subpoenas were abused, so I wouldn't think think those rulings definitively say what NSA is doing is in fact legal. The judges who made the rulings don't think they approved what was actually going on.

Re:judges are pissed NSA lied to get their okay

[causality]

Judges have ruled that the NSA could do these things - when the NSA lied to the judges about what they were doing and how. Some of those judges are pretty pisses off now that they know how the subpoenas were abused, so I wouldn't think think those rulings definitively say what NSA is doing is in fact legal. The judges who made the rulings don't think they approved what was actually going on.

This happened because to become a judge, one must generally be a "believe in the system" type. This is why judges will automatically take the word of a police officer over yours, being impressed by the fact he/she is a "sworn officer", because this type of mentality doesn't consider that cops and other members of government could lie to get what they want. So now it finally bit the judge(s) and made them look bad, feel a little angry? It's been doing that to regular citizens for a long time now.

Re:judges are pissed NSA lied to get their okay

[Hatta]

Secret rulings by secret courts never were never legitimate in the first place.

Re:judges are pissed NSA lied to get their okay

[whoever57]

Even more: think about who appoints federal judges. Does anyone think that a history of ruling against the government helps appointment to a federal bench?

Re:judges are pissed NSA lied to get their okay

[wiredlogic]

The judges who made the rulings don't think they approved what was actually going on.

They knew exactly what was going on but now that the secret is out they are pointing the finger to avoid hurting their careers.

Re:Slip the backdoor into a precompiled GCC instea

[olip85]

Not necessarily : http://www.dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/dissertation/wheeler-trusting-trust-ddc.pdf

What I want to know.

[Lumpy]

What has been snuck past linus and the other code reviewers. Honestly Linus needs to do a call for people to comb through and look specifically for sneaky things. It's not hard to make something look innocent in C but instead it does evil. http://www.ioccc.org/ for example. or more scary... http://underhanded.xcott.com/

Linux needs a security team that is double checked by a team outside the USA so it can be the ONLY OS that can state, "Not compromised by the NSA"

legal != ok, UK not busting US pot smokers

[raymorris]

It's ILLEGAL for the NSA to spy on Americans, and for good reason. That doesn't mean it's OKAY for them to spy on everyone else, but at least it's LEGAL.

As a US citizen, I'd rather China spy on me than the NSA. The reason is because China isn't going to try to "bust" me on a minor and erroneous charge. For example, there is a porn star named Ann Howe aka Melissa who started in porn when she was 20. She looks young, so several people have been busted for "child porn" for having pics of her when she was 20-25 years old. I don't want my government spying on my internet usage because my government will charge me with child porn based on a chick in her twenties. The Chinese government doesn't give a shit what porn I see. Therefore yes, it's less bad for a government to spy on foreigners - even when I am the foreigner.

Re:legal != ok, UK not busting US pot smokers

[Bengie]

Then you get the add that you probably can't fight the charges because the evidence will be classified, so there is no way to defend.

Re:Slip the backdoor into a precompiled GCC instea

[Bucc5062]

Think this this is the most salient point in the whole presentation:

The act of breaking into a computer system has to have the same social stigma as breaking into a neighbor's house. It should not matter that the neighbor's door is unlocked.

Time and time again I hear the old argument "Why not,I got nothing to hide" as it relates to computer access and spying. Present the same person with evidence that their house was accessed while they were out, their car was accessed without their permission and watch the reaction (most likely some variation of anger). People need to be taught that their digital world is just as tangible, just as important as their physical world.

Two questions that would great to put in front of world citizens today,

1 - How would you feel if the government went into your home every day without permission and looked through all your personal property, making copies of all your personal information

2 - How would you feel if the government accessed your personal computer, phone calls, emails, chats, and texts every day, making copies of everything you express and saving it for an unknown length of time?

When outrage is balanced between both is when the people will be able to make a change..

(That was a great read and while just a lowly Programmer, I was fascinated by what Mr. Thompson presented even as I realized there would be no way for me to ever know or change such a situation.)

What, no bench warrants?

[Marrow]

If a judge feels he was deliberately misled, then he could issue a bench warrant for the arrest of the person who misled him. He could put the man on the stand and compel his testimony.
Apparently, the judges are only pissed enough to say they are pissed.

Re:What, no bench warrants?

[cusco]

My mom was a legal secretary for many years. Of the half dozen judges of various types in our small town there was only one who might have been able to withstand a close look at his legal/financial/personal dealings. By the time someone gets high enough in the judicial hierarchy to be anointed to the FISA court you can pretty much guarantee that there is sufficient dirt in their background to keep them pliable. Rather like being a politician from Chicago . . .

Re:What, no bench warrants?

[tqk]

Apparently, the judges are only pissed enough to say they are pissed.

Can you do a citizen's arrest of Clapper?

Re:I couldn't imagine filling the void in my life

[DoofusOfDeath]

I hate people who use char * instead of void * for things like generic buffer handling (e.g. myread()).

Wow, your judgment of a person is contingent on a surprisingly small detail!

Just kidding. It bugs me too. The problem is that programmers aren't always great about differentiating between different levels of abstraction. I.e., calling something "binary data" in contrast to something else. It's all binary data. The question is whether or not you know how to interpret it at a level any higher than "a sequence of bits".

Only the NSA

[clay_shooter]

Good grief. The European, Russian, Arab, Chinese, et al, are all pushing to monitor everything that goes on the wire. Look at the "Great Fire-Wall of China". There are plenty of Easter Europeans that commit code to open source projects. Are you assuming Russia, et al don't put in traps and back doors? The West Europeans are no better. The UK, for instance, has one of the densest CCTV networks in the world.

Re:Only the NSA

[Lumpy]

Bah, who cares, it's all about marketing and right now the NSA is the boogeyman in the room with a spotlight on it. CTO's of corporations don't make educated decisions, they go with whatever looks shiny.

Re:Slip the backdoor into a precompiled GCC instea

[melikamp]

In reality, slipping a backdoor into Linux is much easier: just code it into a proprietary wireless firmware blob which is already a part of the (non-free) kernel distributed at linux.org. The mal-firmware can then spy and report directly from the network card, or use DMA to elevate itself to ring 0 on the main CPU. What makes this scenario most FUN is the sheer likelihood of such a backdoor being in place RIGHT NOW, within the official Linux git repo, since no approval or knowledge by Linus would be required to slip it in.

Re:Slip the backdoor into a precompiled GCC instea

[melikamp]

Yah. Would be practical in the ultimate monoculture scenario, if everyone was coerced into running the same exact OS and kernel and dev stack, but not if the software is free and people are free to study it and use it any way they want.

Re:Slip the backdoor into a precompiled GCC instea

[TangoMargarine]

Good point, although the changeover should be obvious if somebody compiles from the (presumably clean) source and gets a ~significantly different executable. And since they mirror/repo all that stuff, I would think a few vigilant people would be enough to catch it.

joshua

[Joe_Dragon]

let's play a game

Re:Slip the backdoor into a precompiled GCC instea

[PhilHibbs]

Not at all. You only apply the "patch" when debugging symbols are off and optimisation is on, which would cover nearly any production build. Even if you left in debugging symbols, you would still have a hard time discovering it with a debugger since optimisation is supposed do change the output.

So you compile the compiler in debug mode (no patch), use that build to compile it again in normal mode, and the patch is gone. Problem solved. In any case, I didn't mean "compiled in debug mode", I mean an external debug tool that can hex dump and disassemble.

Re:Are you fine with China getting in and snooping

[I'm New Around Here]

Just for your information, I'm Belgian :-)

Oh no! Everyone, quick, look for a dead body. There must be one around here somewhere.

Pet peeve alert

[naasking]

Pet peeve alert:

Torvalds responded 'no' while shaking his head 'yes,'

You don't shake your head 'yes', you nod your head 'yes'. Shaking your head indicates 'no'.

Re:Pet peeve alert

[omnichad]

Both are correct grammar and accurate. One just happens to be a common phrase. If I stuck to common phrases in speech, my life would be boring.

Re:Pet peeve alert

[naasking]

Grammatically correct, yes. Accurate, no. It has nothing to do with common phrasing. Nodding is specifically an up-down motion with the head. Shaking is left-right motion with the head. The former is almost universally taken to mean agreement, the latter almost universally taken to mean disagreement. Check the links.

Re:Pet peeve alert

[omnichad]

Shaking a head generally means a left-right motion. But shake is a word on its own and as such, can refer to any vibratory movement in any direction. Why do I care that Wikipedia says what "shaking a head" means? That doesn't mean it's the only way you can shake a head. It's just defining the meaning of a common phrase in common usage - not dictating the only possible usage of a set of words. But the quote says that he shook it to indicate yes, which still gives enough detail to understand what's being said.

Re:Pet peeve alert

[oodaloop]

And yet, somehow, everyone seems to have understood what was meant. So what's the problem?

Re:Pet peeve alert

[naasking]

And yet, somehow, everyone seems to have understood what was meant. So what's the problem?

Because he contradicted himself in the same sentence resulting in ambiguity. We only understood unambiguously what was meant because of the additional context that Linus also said 'no', and the laughter of the audience implied a juxtaposition between words and action. Striving for clarity is not a bad thing.

Sometimes.

[BrokenHalo]

Plus, over the course of a lifetime, the "you"s change.

Except in Australia, where (I am appalled to say) the term "youse" means a plurality of "you"s. [Sigh. For the information of the illiter8 ba5tards among us, "you" is the second-person plural form as opposed to the now obsolete first-person "thou". The latter is still good for Shakespearian insults, though, e.g. "thou remnant!"]

False Headline, Attempted FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Watch the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84Sx0E13gAo&t=1456

He was CLEARLY joking. After the "yes" nod, he smiles and actually says "no." He didn't admit to anything. He was just trying to be funny.

Why is it so hard to take things in their full context?

It all depends...

[Dcnjoe60]

From the description of the study, it seems to me that people who have formed an opinion won't change it just because they see a single piece of potentially falsified or misleading evidence. For example (looking at one of the experiments), if someone has an opinion on joblessness in the US - which might bring in factors of job stability, hours worked or attainment of a living wage - seeing a single graph on number of employed people in recent years does not allow us to conclude that joblessness has been reduced under Obama, unless you have a very primitive interpretation of "joblessness".

The only damning conclusion is that some academics are so arrogant that they assume test subjects must be faulty if they don't immediately believe the academic's interpretation of some data presented to them.

Learning math, and being shown that an equation is incorrect, one readily accepts that. Things like unemployment, climate change, etc., aren't about concrete objective things, but instead are really various facets of one's ideology. Ideology, like religion is hard to change and pretty much for the same reason. It is not based on knowledge, but instead on belief.

That can be good or bad, depending on how it is used, but most often, it turns out to be bad. Ideologies often force us to characterize others by stereotypes, not individuals. What is happening in the US Congress and many parts of the world politically, is all based on people holding on to their ideologies and not not listening to the other side. Holding to ideologies instead of the underlying principles leads to the notion of if you aren't with me you are against me and that ultimately leads to disaster for a society by concentrating the power in the hands of a few at the expense of many.

One thing is for certain, you don't change people's ideology with facts. Facts appeal to the rational, logical part of our psyche. Ideology, on the other hand is an emotional response and like love is often anything but logical.

Re:It all depends...

[Anonymous Coward]

Things like unemployment, climate change, etc., aren't about concrete objective things, but instead are really various facets of one's ideology.

Phew, that's good to know. For a moment I thought that there was a finite number of people who couldn't find work and had to lower their living standards while searching for a job. I have also been worried that the measurable levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might be causally linked to how much carbon-containing material was oxidized and released into the atmosphere, and further that the level of carbon dioxide had a very strong correlation with average global temperatures. Now I can return to consumption-based hedonistic behavior.

Re:It all depends...

[Xyrus]

Things like unemployment, climate change, etc., aren't about concrete objective things, but instead are really various facets of one's ideology.

The identification and study of climate change is just one result from some 120+ years of climate research. In fact, if you go back to the origins of greenhouse theory it's closer to 200 years of climate research.

Perhaps you have a different definition of "concrete and objective".

Re:It all depends...

[Dcnjoe60]

Things like unemployment, climate change, etc., aren't about concrete objective things, but instead are really various facets of one's ideology.

The identification and study of climate change is just one result from some 120+ years of climate research. In fact, if you go back to the origins of greenhouse theory it's closer to 200 years of climate research.

Perhaps you have a different definition of "concrete and objective".

If you asks leading scientists in the 70s the planet was cooling. But that isn't the point. It doesn't matter whether it is heating up or cooling (well it does), but in terms of the discussion, people hold on to their position based on ideological points of view, not scientific ones. As such, if you want to change people's views, you need to approach it from changing an ideology, not from just presenting facts (as we have found out). For those that hold on to the notion that climate change is bogus (again ideology speaking), all the facts in the world won't change their mind until the ice caps melt and the oceans rise and the coastal areas flood (and even then, they will blame it on something else).

That is the problem with arguing about ideology. Since they aren't usually predicated on facts, facts do little to sway those that hold to them.

Re:It all depends...

[Anonymous Coward]

For a moment I thought that there was a finite number of people who couldn't find work and had to lower their living standards while searching for a job. I have also been worried that the measurable levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might be causally linked to how much carbon-containing material was oxidized and released into the atmosphere, and further that the level of carbon dioxide had a very strong correlation with average global temperatures.

The finite number of people who can't find work varies a lot depending on how you count. By one count, 7% of Americans are unemployed. Fewer than 60% of Americans over 18 have jobs - maybe that means unemployment is really 40%. Some people will tell you they'd like to have a job, if someone offered one, but they've just given up looking. Some people are unemployed today because their job doesn't start until tomorrow. What about contractors or day laborers - they don't really have a job, per se, but they certainly work most every day. But those are just numbers - what you really mean when you talk about unemployment is whether the specific number you give is "bad" or "good" for society. Is 8% unemployment bad? There are plenty of places where unemployment has been 20+% forever, and those countries haven't collapsed.

Likewise, when you say there is a correlation between global temperature and atmospheric CO2, that's a fact. When you leap from that fact to the claim that human burning of fossil fuels has caused global warming, that's an interpretation open to argument. When you take the next step and say that we should all give up our consumption-based hedonistic lifestyle because a 2 oC change in planetary temperature will kill off mankind in just a couple hundred years, you've stepped far beyond rational facts and entered ideologically driven proscription..

The problem seems to be that you can start with a concrete fact, pile some ideology on top of it, and come to conclusions that you believe are rational, evidence-based facts. Individuals seem to be really bad at recognizing when they have departed from the strictly factual into the speculative.

a backdoor in open source software

[Anonymous Coward]

looks like a bug: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/15/openbsd_backdoor_claim/

Land of the "free"

[johanw]

But he is forbidden to talk about it and has to communicate it this way. Reminds me of the proposal to publish your pgp key with the note "this key has not been compromised". When thr government demand the key you remove the note.

Re:Slip the backdoor into a precompiled GCC instea

[ais523]

Not at all. You only apply the "patch" when debugging symbols are off and optimisation is on, which would cover nearly any production build. Even if you left in debugging symbols, you would still have a hard time discovering it with a debugger since optimisation is supposed do change the output.

You would also make it trigger under very special circumstances and as others have pointed out, the error you introduce could be a subtle change of behaviour of the random number generator.

If you did that, the backdoor would disappear over the course of time whenever someone released a production compiler that was compiled with a debugging-symbol version of the same compiler. (This is a lot more likely than it seems; the people who actually develop compilers, and thus compile them, are likely to have debugging symbols on for their compilers as a matter of course, because they frequently make changes that break them.)

Re:Well, did he do it?

[I'm New Around Here]

Finally, someone with a sense of humor.

it's a certainty

[stenvar]

The Windows update mechanism is a huge backdoor: any code can be introduced onto your machine at any time. And pushing a compromise as a "special" update is far better than distributing it to everyone, since it makes detection much less likely.

Re:it's a certainty

[phantomfive]

good point

Re:it's a certainty

[petermgreen]

The same can be said of many linux distros, if you can get your hands on the signing key for one or more of the repositories and you can mess with a user's internet connection you can deliver them modified updates.

Re:it's a certainty

[stenvar]

True, although for Linux, there are many easy ways you can protect yourself against it that don't exist for Windows.

We could call it something else

[Provocateur]

We could call it kernel-open-OPEN -source-for-all-you-douchebags-this-ones-for-you-rc1 or something

You can joke about serious matters

[sjbe]

Torvalds said no while nodding his head yes is a JOKE people, not a fucking admission.

I agree it is a joke but making a joke does not mean there is nothing serious being communicated. The best jokes are usually about topics that are very serious. Maybe it was a joke and nothing more (I certainly hope so) but without more information you cannot actually be certain either way. If he was asked to put a back door in that would hardly be a surprising revelation.

Please, save the tinfoil paranoia for Reddit, and keep the serious tech discussions here.

You think the idea of a backdoor in linux is not a serious tech topic? Besides it's only paranoia if "they" are not actually after you. Recent revelations about the NSA and other government activities clearly demonstrates that being concerned over government snooping is actually quite reasonable.

Re:You can joke about serious matters

[Common Joe]

Or perhaps it was meant to be funny, but not really a joke at all. If he truly was asked to put a back door in, "they" would certainly not want him to say anything about it. At this point, he can honestly tell them they he did not violate whatever they wanted him to do. He can tell them it was simply a joke and point to many people (like here in Slashdot) who interpreted it as a joke. The tin-foil hat crowd, however, understood correctly.

Was it a joke or was it a nod and wink? We may never know, but he gave a great answer in either case. It will keep everyone on their toes... which is exactly what we should be doing anyway.

Re:You can joke about serious matters

[sjbe]

Was it a joke or was it a nod and wink?

Exactly. I'm sure it was a joke but it might very well have been ha-ha-only-serious. The topic itself is no laughing matter but it sounds like he handled the question appropriately.

Catch 22

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been pulled over for going the speed limit. Probable cause, "Your driving was suspicious. Nobody drives the speed limit around here.". No way to win.

Re:Slip the backdoor into a precompiled GCC instea

[bill_mcgonigle]

Exactly. Back in the bad-old-days when I used to compile gcc a lot, it came with a stage 1 compiler, which was simple enough to be compatible with a wide range of system cc's but strong enough to compile stage 2, which was then strong enough to compile all of gcc.

I don't know if clang has the same approach (or, heck, if gcc even does still) but the approach is straightforward. I was a bit disappointed to see that FreeBSD went from a two-compiler standard to a single-compiler standard for this very reason.

The other added advantage of the 3-layer approach, is that if you can audit the stage 1 compiler, that should be sufficient for checking for Trusting-Trust attacks. If you ever suspect that "all" of the compilers have been compromised, you need "only" write a new basic c compiler that can compile gcc stage 1. If you don't ever have to worry about doing optimizations, it's something that can be done as a university-level project.

Could, would be error while Congressional hearings

[raymorris]

Sure they _could_, but since the people who misled the judges were representatives of an agency, engaging in the agency's business as directed by their superiors, it's better that the agency and it's leaders are held accountable. For now, there are congressional hearings going on handling the matter through the political process, with congresscritters feeling public pressure. As a general rule, judges don't like to single-handedly usurp the public political process. Of course the Supreme Court from time to time has to rule on cases involving politically disputed issues, but lower courts generally shouldn't.

If, through the process of congressional hearings and such, it becomes clear that specific people committed perjury, that would be time for courts to convict certain people, after the public has made decisions through their elected representatives.

Amusing, but..

[Weezul]

There is more risk of being caught implanting a bug in Linux :

Imagine you send Linus, Alan Cox, etc. an NSL telling him to implant some bug himself. What could go wrong?

First, Linus is famous. Are you going to lock him up for violating the NSL and telling everyone about it? Even if he doesn't violate it, he could obtain the resources for a court fight by merely hinting. NSLs aren't usually challenged, but several lost in court.

Second, Linus could quietly tell another kernel developer or security researcher who then "discovers" the bug. Again, you cannot prosecute Linus himself so easily because he's famous. In fact, any court case eventually exposes that you're inserting backdoors, which makes a mess.

You might attempt this through another less famous kernel developer, but his patches likely receive more review, and he could still quietly leak the bug.

So what do you do? Just make the patch as useful as possible, make the insecurity created a subtle and plausibly deniable as possible, and submit the patch through extremely public channels. Don't involve crazy unpredictable developer types if at all possible. That's how you minimize your chances of exposing your backdoor program.

Linux is an idea, Windows is a product

[Scot Seese]

Linux is a philosophy. Windows is a product created and sold by a company headquartered and registered in the United States, and as such, is subject to all laws and regulations of the U.S. Government.

Of course Windows contains back doors for law enforcement and intelligence authorities. Why should this be so surprising?

I have theorized for decades that the "zero day exploits" that hackers keep finding in Microsoft Windows are merely security holes created for government agencies. By dumb luck or determination, skilled hackers stumble across those exploits. Microsoft hires talented coders and engineers, and some of the security flaws revealed in Windows exploits are simply too egregious to be explained as "sloppy coding."

Already solved. See arxiv link

[sgtrock]

Fully Countering Trusting Trust Through Diverse Double-Compiling

Which is why distros should use...

[sgtrock]

Fully Countering Trusting Trust Through Diverse Double-Compiling

And we should be reminded of the cure, too

[sgtrock]

Fully Countering Trusting Trust Through Diverse Double-Compiling

Re:Slip the backdoor into a precompiled GCC instea

[steelfood]

It's not feasible for a general attack, but it's still possible with a targetted attack. Still, I wouldn't look there. Intel and other microprocessor makers are a much easier target. In fact, that's one of the things that came out in Snowden's documents. The NSA asked one of the companies to put a backdoor into hardware that was being shipped to the government of another country.

Viedo Link

[rea1l1]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=84Sx0E13gAo

Heres the video. Set it @ 24 minutes 15 seconds.

Re:Slip the backdoor into a precompiled GCC instea

[wisnoskij]

The problem is only solved if anyone does this. Scratch that, everyone does this.
Good luck getting 80 million people to do with with no way to know if it would solve their backdoor problem.

Re:Are you fine with China getting in and snooping

[Scoldog]

How far away do you live from Aristotle's birth place?

Re:Slip the backdoor into a precompiled GCC instea

[GauteL]

It would only disappear temporarily until you again used the malign production compiler to compile a new production version of the compiler.

If you compile the next production compiler with the last development compiler (which in turn has been compiled with the previous iteration of development compiler) you risk spreading bugs which aren't actually in the source code of the compiler anymore. This carries it's own problems. You also risk making the next stable version of GCC impossible to compile with the previous stable version of GCC.

Without knowing this for sure, I would strongly suspect that the final production version of the RHEL 7.x GCC compiler is actually compiled with the last production version of the RHEL 6.x compiler.

There are a lot of interesting solutions to this problem in the thread following my post, but none of them actually contain any evidence that any of these solutions are actually used by Red Hat, Debian, Canonical, etc.

Re:Slip the backdoor into a precompiled GCC instea

[GauteL]

The problem is only solved if anyone does this. Scratch that, everyone does this.

Bingo!

Re:Slip the backdoor into a precompiled GCC instea

[GauteL]

"I mean an external debug tool that can hex dump and disassemble."

Good luck with that. We're talking about millions of code lines resulting in even more millions of lines of assembly, which has been automatically optimised and thus aren't exactly the same as the direct translation of the C++ code to assembler. Furthermore, you have to do this without knowing what you are looking for, or even if anything wrong exists. Debugging the Linux kernel to find the problem would be near impossible, because you'd have to actually match the exact conditions the backdoor appears in order to find it in the debugger.

Debugging the compiler would be your best bet and theoretically you could quite easily match the conditions in compiling the new production version of GCC, but you'd have to go through it step by step to figure out whether it is doing the expected thing for your optimisation level.

You may as well just study the disassembled code line by line to work out if it is the expected output from compiling the new version of GCC with the exact version of GCC you already have.

No, its better to fry the little fish first

[Marrow]

And have them roll on their superiors who often have powerful friends and/or "clean" public personae.

Nyet

[carys689]

Just say 'no'. And tell them to f--k off while you're at it.

Why always from the United States?

[Gel214th]

Question is why do these technological advances always come out of the United States? It seems that if Linux originated say in Germany there wouldn't be much of a problem with the NSA demanding a back door.
But so much of our technology is tied to the US, and government regulations that it seems inevitable that all the popular software we use has been compromised. Which raises the question that if the NSA can access any computer, what makes us think that hackers have not found the same back doors?

Backdoors and open-source

[eijk]

Read this for a theoretical possibility how backdoors could go unnoticed in open-source based systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backdoor_(computing)#Reflections_on_Trusting_Trust

Re:Slip the backdoor into a precompiled GCC instea

[toddestan]

Well, it's easier than compiling Visual Studio from source using gcc...

If you have nothing to hide?

[Stolzy]

"They" often say, "if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to worry about."

My response to this is, "so using that argument, can you tell me if anyone has ever been jailed for a crime they did not commit?"

I'm so glad that I live in a world with Open Source, Creative Commons, and the GNU and also Linux projects exist.

I wonder if the Spooks could be sued for Copyright Infringement if they spy on people?

/Stolzy