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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[bytesex]

Where in the article does it say that he declined?

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

[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

[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]

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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: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.

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 ...

[trewornan]

Many a true word is spoken in jest.

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.

No, it might not

[bitbucketeer]

Reflections on Trusting Trust

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.

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

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).

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: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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: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: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: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.

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.

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: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.

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.

Which is why distros should use...

[sgtrock]

Fully Countering Trusting Trust Through Diverse Double-Compiling