A few years back I was talking to an acquaintance that worked in the NSA for about a decade, he was far to casual when he said “Oh, yeah we have back doors in Linux and all over the open source world that haven’t been discovered.”.
I mean, yeah, that tracks but did he have to be so proud of his achievement. He was one of those, ‘see if it can be done don’t question if it should’ kind of people.
I suppose it is a part of their NOBUS “NObody But US” strategy but with the code being in the open, that is a dangerous game to play with it being discovered by others. Nowadays with LLM’s able to do mass analysis of code, I do wonder if there is some regrets in putting those things in there?
But also I suspect a lot of it probably needs physical access to the machine as just sending a few packets to a machine probably isn’t enough to get it into an executable state.
Either way, interesting guy, wouldn’t trust him with anything!
They also develop and maintain Ghidra, which is also open source.
Even though the NSA sits on a trove of zero day vulnerabilities, they still need to ensure their systems (and by some extension, America’s systems) are actually secure.
They also developed Ghidra which is a fantastic reverse engineering tool.
SELinux and Tor aren’t a super duper secret fed backdoor, they’re FOSS security software that gains a lot of benefit for being open source.
If you want an actual backdoor that the NSA has conventiently abused before, look at the Intel management engine CVEs which Snowdon exposed they had made several custom implants for.
Or the classic 2017 Windows Eternal Blue exploit which the NSA admitted to holding on to for 5 years even though the rumor is they probably discovered it back in the Windows XP era lol.
Yep I had a work computer that was affected by the Intel null password exploit in 2017. Event logs showed access allowed without password credential supplied, and my camera had been turned on permanently. The camera on/off only toggled the LED state.
It was trivial to review and match the setup imposed by security enhanced Linux as it was open source and for its time, well documented.
no conspiracy other than it guided otherwise ignorant folks on what hardening a system could look like.
I mean, who better to be security minded than the people whose job it is to spy on people? (But yeah, the open source part is doing the heavy lifting on trust).
Tor is mostly funded by the US government too. It’s still amazing software, and even CIA and FBI agents use it iirc.
The idea of course being that if you see traffic from TOR and its a private connection, you know its feds. If you instead publicize it and the fed version is indistinguishable from the normie one (because theyre just the same version) then you dont know if you have regular paranoid traffic or fed traffic, thus protecting feds.
Anonymity loves company.
Yep, it’s a nice arrangement for both feds and mere mortals.
And like. The feds are dumbasses. Their honeypots are so fucking obvious.
They ones that you think are obvious are obvious
If they weren’t obvious you wouldn’t notice them
Maybe they make you think you’re doing a good job avoiding them by putting out bad ones, then get you with a good oneTrue. Nobody’s noticed I’m a fed yet.
How do I know your not a bad honeypot though?
@CIA_chatbot@lemmy.world is this true?
Nah, Ricky has been totally flying under the radar, no one has flagged him as a fed yet! …. Wait. GOD DAMNIT RICKY!
Dang, shoulda called it, classic fed behavior feeding the assumption that fed honeypots are easy to spot…
They designed it because they wanted it to secure their own systems. Think about that. If you aren’t using selinux full out the NSA and their counter-parts in other countries can get into your shit. Probably
They designed it because they wanted it to secure their own systems.
But nothing is stopped them from having an internally used “hardened” branch then giving the public the one that still has some intentional holes in it.
Free labor
NSA has a dual mandate, they do both offense and defense. It leads to conflicts…
The NSA also does a lot of work with regards to computer security
SElinux/MAC are fantastic tools that can be used to lock down a system. Android largely hasn’t been impacted by many of the severe Linux vulnerabilities due to SElinux
ITT: it’s fine, they’re from US
No, ITT: it’s fine, it’s open source and closely monitored
ITT: it’s fine, they’re
from USalready spying on us
US Navel Intelligence made Tor originally
