Date: Tue, 16 May 2006 16:40:44 +0200
From: Jakob Oestergaard <jakob@unthought.net>
To: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Cc: Marc Perkel <marc@perkel.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Wiretapping Linux?
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On Tue, May 16, 2006 at 09:48:25AM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
...
> > So what about Linux? With thousands of people working on the Kernel if
> > someone from the NSA wanted to slip a back door into the Kernel, could
> > the do that?
> 
> Well, yes and no.
> 
...
> There's so much free stuff out there, that people download and install
> blindly, that I'm sure if someone wanted to really badly, they could get
> it on some boxes.  If they were slime and added something to a binary,
> and supplied the source without the backdoor, that might last a while.
> Unless you compile everything yourself, it's not easy to make sure that
> all binaries came from the source you have.

Read "Reflections on Trusting Trust" to see why compiling things from
source gets you absolutely *zero* extra security in this regard.

http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/

-- 

 / jakob

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