Spinoffs From Spyland: How Some NSA Technology Is Making Its Way Into Industry

An anonymous reader writes with this news from MIT's Technology Review: "Like other federal agencies, the NSA is compelled by law to try to commercialize its R&D. It employs patent attorneys and has a marketing department that is now trying to license inventions ... The agency claims more than 170 patents ... But the NSA has faced severe challenges trying to keep up with rapidly changing technology. ... Most recently, the NSA's revamp included a sweeping effort to dismantle ... 'stovepipes,' and switch to flexible cloud computing ... in 2008, NSA brass ordered the agency's computer and information sciences research organization to create a version of the system Google uses to store its index of the Web and the raw images of Google Earth. That team was led by Adam Fuchs, now Sqrrl's chief technology officer. Its twist on big data was to add 'cell-level security,' a way of requiring a passcode for each data point ... that's how software (like the infamous PRISM application) knows what can be shown only to people with top-secret clearance. Similar features could control access to data about U.S. citizens. 'A lot of the technology we put [in] is to protect rights," says Fuchs. Like other big-data projects, the NSA team's system, called Accumulo, was built on top of open-source code because "you don't want to have to replicate everything yourself," ... In 2011, the NSA released 200,000 lines of code to the Apache Foundation. When Atlas Venture's Lynch read about that, he jumped—here was a technology already developed, proven to work on tens of terabytes of data, and with security features sorely needed by heavily regulated health-care and banking customers.'"

Comments

stovepiping

[Gravis Zero]

i suspected but looked it up anyway.

A stovepipe is a system created to solve a specific problem

Re:stovepiping

[Marrow]

Stovepiping was a technique used to arrive at a specific desired answer regardless of the facts. Gaming the system to get it to sign off on the wrong answer.

Re:stovepiping

[cold fjord]

Stovepipes are what emerges when you keep building single purpose systems without integrating them, and often with no thought of integration. It doesn't tend to be a good thing since related data can exist in different systems with no easy way to relate it. It has historically been a real problem in both government and industry.

In short your answer is pure BS, or as you put it, "a specific desired answer regardless of the facts."

Time for a code review?

[Gravis Zero]

In 2011, the NSA released 200,000 lines of code to the Apache Foundation.

it may be time for people to start looking for the backdoors that the NSA may have put into Apache.

Re:Time for a code review?

[LookIntoTheFuture]

In 2011, the NSA released 200,000 lines of code to the Apache Foundation.

it may be time for people to start looking for the backdoors that the NSA may have put into Apache.

You know what scares me most? Code obfuscation.

Re:Time for a code review?

[VortexCortex]

Or they could simply discard the code from the NSA on security / espionage grounds.

The code that is obviously the NSA's contribution is not the back door. The back door likely would leverage some edge case created by their contributions, or another part of the system altogether while the NSA part is fully legit. Attributing the secret agencies goodwill is a huge part of disinformation and image management to convince people to accept the FBI & NSA anti-activism campaign.

Perhaps it would be something like this:
// Change the file permission.
if ( option == CHANGE_OWNER && sessionState == VALID && user = ROOT ) {
// ...
}
// Current user is now root priveledged.

A single equal char is missing, it looks like it could be a legitimate mistake. Perfect plausible deniability. Such would be contributed by someone else who seems innocuous. Perhaps even by a change nearby which happens to change the formatting or constant name, and thus the logic change is easier to miss.

Point being, it really doesn't matter either way. They won't admit to all the shit they do, and have a long history of being against the populace, even committing illegal acts. So, the only answer is to demand eradication of secrecy in governance. Otherwise the people can never know whether their government is or is not operating in the best interest of citizens. We shouldn't have to wonder if their concern is just lies to manufacture consent for a more draconian dystopia; We should be able to prove our governments are not acting against us.

Re:Time for a code review?

[cold fjord]

In 2011, the NSA released 200,000 lines of code to the Apache Foundation.

it may be time for people to start looking for the backdoors that the NSA may have put into Apache.

I'm sure you wouldn't want another "disaster" like SELinux (also from NSA) would you?

"the NSA is compelled by law"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, in the same way that my cat is compelled by my commands.

So what?

[russotto]

Spinoffs from Nazi technology got us to the moon. That some good can come out of evil does not make the evil less evil.

Re:So what?

[thoth]

How is heck is this insightful?

I thought Slashdot was the bastion of "technology is inherently neutral; anything can be used for various purposes and that doesn't make them bad". See previous argument as applied to guns, encryption, laser pointers, chemistry, hell scientific progress in general.

break laws but not licenses?

[morethanapapercert]

Let me get this straight; the NSA (and the other three letter agencies it serves) are willing to blatantly and flagrantly violate the US Constitution, US law, international treaties, the trust of US allies and probably even the boy scout oath along the way, but it heeds the open source licensing model???

I think there are a few problems with this:

Like others have posted, the open source community is going to have to look at the released code very very carefully. The public has to assume that the NSA will include backdoors or obscure weaknesses if at all possible.

The other half of this is how in the hell this release of code passed any internal security review in order to have the release authorized. If *I* were in charge of an intelligence agency, I certainly would use Open Source code when and where practical, but I would NOT submit my code to any third party external to my nations intelligence community. My reasoning is that any code my organization released could be used as clues to figure out my agencies capabilities and current operations. Even something as seemingly innocuous as the code for mandatory access restrictions could be helpful to an enemy because analysis of it would at least allow the enemy to rule out certain forms of attack.

Oh sure, you could make the argument that releasing better code to the world makes everybody using that code base safer, depriving malicious agents of any existing exploits they have in their tool kits and that was probably among the reasons the NSA based its decision on. The problem I have with that argument is that, in other areas the NSA has proven that it is willing to deliberately weaken code that is in public use so as to add to their own tool kits. To fix existing weaknesses while also deliberately creating others seems illogical and self defeating to me...

Re:break laws but not licenses?

[Antique Geekmeister]

> Like others have posted, the open source community is going to have to look at the released code very very carefully. The public has to assume that the NSA will include backdoors or obscure weaknesses if at all possible.

And look for licensing violations. Various "open source" license models allow modifying and republishing software without publishing your modifications. But if they inserted back doors into, for example, GPL licensed software without publishing the back doors, they'd be violating the software licenses.

Re:Software licence change

[Antique Geekmeister]

This is infeasible. Network tools like "tripwire" have powerful, legitimate uses.