Re: Wiretapping Linux?

[Jakob Oestergaard]

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

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/