The story does not tell us how Linus Torvalds responded to the NSA, but I’m guessing he told them he wouldn’t be able to inject backdoors even if he wanted to, since the source code is open, and all changes to it are reviewed by many independent people.
Yeah I’m guessing the answer would be more colorful based on the historical data we have
based on the historical data
There aren’t enough swear-words in the English language, so now I’ll have to call you perkeleen vittupää just to express my disgust and frustration with this crap.
Beautiful
It’s like our very own Gordon Ramsay
This is beautiful. Thank you! lol
Also experience shows that it’s possible to backdoor software in very subtle ways that could go years without anyone spotting them. So if he had decided to he probably could have done it, despite Linux being open source.
I would pay money to see daddy Linus flip off some big shot intelligence official
Oh man would die to see his reply. It would probably start with something like
“The fact that I have to explain this to a person who works in a national security agency makes me really worried…”
Ohh so it’s the NSA that my failed sudos are reported to!
Recent versions of sudo changed that message and now I’m sad 😢
Damn, I’m going to miss those messages one day on my Debian stable server.
Switch to doas so feds don’t get any more reports!
nah, we have run0 at home
I somehow misread that as NBA, and was very confused what basketball had to do with OS backdoors
NSA makes
WAY more sense
Michel jordan want to look at your browser history :D
Nope this has Kareem written all over it
Roger Murdock?
No, that’s Mark McGwire.
A OS backdoor is very simular to a backdoor cut, which allows a player to sneak behind defenders when they are focused on the ball or player with a ball.
NBA coaches have taken inspiration from many different places to perfect their plays. Computer security is just another step.
I read it NASA at first
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they wanted to cut to the basket behind the defense
Years ago there was a commit to the Linux kernal that strangly had no author. This got some attention of several of the developers.
Looking into the code that had to deal with network transmission. there was a section that if you tried to get network access in a unusual way had a check that was written something like this.
If (usr_permission = ROOT) … Instead of If (usr_permission == ROOT) …
The first giving the user root if invoked and the second checking to see if the user was root.
It’s widely thought this was the NSA or some other intelligence agency trying to backdoor lin Linux.
The other side of that coin is the NSA developing SELinux
This is because NSA has two roles: eavesdropping on foreign adversaries, and protecting our internal systems from adversaries. Under the first role, they might introduce an exploit known only to themselves. Under the second, they help protect US systems from exploits known to others.
And because of this it makes whatever they fuck with have unnecessary security issues.
Also though they are using it to straight up spy on you whether foreign or not. They got in “trouble” for it once and pinky swore not to do it again.
Fuck the NSA
Now they get the Brits and Aussies to do it and give them the reports.
Or it could of been any person or country. It was a nothing burger and is still a nothing burger
It was clearly an attack. By who is unknown.
Notably this was in 2003 before git (2005) so linux source was in a central bitkeeper repo. So a commit with no associated data about who did it should not have been possible.
Here is a more detailed article. https://lwn.net/Articles/57135/
speaking in burger terms as any good american
Proud to be an American, at least I know I’m free.
Free to buy all the hamburgers!
fork the kernel and yeet it?
It was caught and never made it in the kernel.
Gud gud
This incident will be reported
he wouldn’t be able to inject backdoors even if he wanted to, since the source code is open
Jia Tan has entered the chat
The project contains binary blobs anyway so theoretically it wouldn’t be super hard
But nobody’s going to give them any sentence for that unfortunately.
I wouldn’t be surprised if I knew that the backdoors that appear in Windows were designed by someone. I didn’t know they were this brazen.
chips too
Yeah, when the actual mobo and cpu can be taken over remotely, what does the OS even matter?
Examples ?
exploits regularly found in AMD and intel consumer chips
didn’t apple chips get spotted with a vulnerability also? m2s?
That’s not a hard proof, people keep saying Intel ME and AMD PSP are potential backdoors ( key word: potential ) and this argument is good if we’re arguing about: which is the best ISA, an Open ISA ( RiscV ) or closed ISA ( x86 )
I was asking for a general example, I know that Mediatek chips included a backdoor but I only found one article that talked about it … In french…
Mobos : I think it’s MSI ( I could be wrong ) that installed a peace of software through a Bios update, which showed they have privileged remote access capabilities ( I couldn’t find that source, sorry )
Another example would be ASUS and Gigabyte Mobos, now the initial source says it came from the second hand resellers, but no one confirmed that… which is scary… because that would mean it came straight from ASUS and/or Gigabyte
I was asking for incidents that you came across that could demonstrate the presence of firmware backdoors, saying having too many bugs is not a good argument, because all software has bugs.
I didn’t know they were this brazen.
Oh boy i remember when i was this innocent
I’m not innocent, but this is unbelievable, that they would ask the main developer to plant a virus in it!! This is really rude
He is lucky he is no a US national… that convo could have gone down differently. People telling US spooks no, don’t live long.
tbf the article only assumes he told them no because of how implausible it seems the task would be, the actual details of what if anything was discussed and what happened are unknown.
of all the things the nsa has done this is probably the nicest
For what? Destabilizing the whole technological ecosystem of the planet is not a crime. ¯\(ツ)/¯
As long as the backdoor is licenced GPL what’s the problem?
good thing he’s not an American citizen
Except he is. He lives in portland now afaik
it’s over
Here’s where Linus did/said the thing. (He is the second person from the right.)
When was the last analysis of the linux kernel source code ?
If you want t see Mr. Torvalds questioning this in the video in the link, go straight to minute 43.
What Mr torvalds is that?
Dad.
Circa 1975, IBM proposed the cipher now called DES, the Data Encryption Standard. It became a worldwide standard for secret key encryption. As IBM originally designed it, DES had a 64-bit key. The National Security Agency (NSA) required that the key be reduced from 64 bits to 56 bits, with the other 8 bits used as a checksum. This made no sense. If a checksum were really needed, then the key could be increased from 64 to 72 bits. It was widely believed that the real reason the NSA made this demand was that it knew how to crack messages using a 56-bit key, but not messages using a 64-bit key. This proved to be true.
Secret Key Cryptography by Frank Rubin
Lol good year for the NSA
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Who pissed on your chips, Mr. Grumpy?
You really took the time to comment and complain that you’ve already seen this? You’re… upset that your time was wasted?
Buddy. Cmon.
