Bonum Certa Men Certa

The Increasing Danger of Back Doors in Standards and Binary Blobs

Summary: The risk of back doors in GNU/Linux comes not from source code but from blobs, back room deals, the build process, and bogus standards with weaknesses cleverly shoehorned into them

IT HAS BEEN a while since we last wrote about Mr. Srinivasan from Microsoft-Novell. Suffice to say, Novell did a lot for Microsoft and some former staff of Novell continues to work for Microsoft (either directly or indirectly). One gift from Novell to Microsoft was OOXML inside FOSS/OOo. Another was Mono and let's not forget intrusion into Linux itself. Robert Pogson goes as far as saying that Microsoft "Hacked Linux!"



"My configuration," Pogson argues, "has CONFIG_HYPERV not set. The code in question is Copyright 2010, Novell (mshyperv.c), and Copyright 2009, M$ (vmbus_drv.c). K. Y. Srinivasan is listed as one of the authours on both. I’m not about to run that other OS on Beast, but thank you, Thomas Gleixner, for fixing things." (see this link)

Performance issues overlook the much bigger problem -- a problem which we addressed several times before. We already know that the NSA is pursuing back doors in Linux [1, 2, 3, 4] and as we pointed out before, the NSA might already have some.

incidentally, as we have shown before, Yahoo was fighting against NSA surveillance in court. When Microsoft took over Yahoo it became apparent that Yahoo stopped fighting and soon became part of PRISM. While some new reports suggest that Yahoo might be ready to escape Microsoft "Yahoo is still in NSA's pocket though even if they break free of Microsoft," explains iophk.

Likewise, even if Linux does not engage with Microsoft, the code from Microsoft remains stuck inside Linux and even if there are no back doors in the code itself, this connects to a system, Hyper-V, which is developed by a back doors specialist (Microsoft). There are binary-level back doors from which to access GNU/Linux systems because if the host machine runs Windows, then we already know that the NSA has access. A nearby company that I once visited, UKFast (the UK's largest 'cloud' provider), runs GNU/Linux servers under HyperV, based on what they told me. How insane is that?! GCHO must love it!

Adding to some concerns about back doors, NSA ally and PRISM partner Apple turns out to have hidden a back door. As Think Progress puts it, "Apple quietly released a major update Friday to fix a security glitch in its iOS 7 systems. But independent security experts say the seemingly routine update covers up what arguably could be Apple’s biggest security lapse, exposing iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users to hackers."

Whether it's a back door or just direct access does not matter, but it enables Apple to dance around important questions. It works across several Apple platforms, even desktop platforms [1].

As iophk put it, in relation to this other new article [2] "Potential problems with an official back door in HTTP 2.0, though only in a proposed draft so far. But because of the ways certificates are currently (mis-)managed, this kind of interception of HTTPS is already easy."

"See one example with four steps," he added, pointing to [3] from the OpenBSD mailing lists.

It's not as though GNU/Linux is immune to back doors (Debian has some new security advisories [4,5]), but at least with access to source code the back doors remain very shallow and too risky/difficult for malicious/covert entities to hide. It's when proprietary software gets added that we lose the ability to ascertain security and privacy.

Related/contextual items from the news:


  1. Apple SSL Vulnerability Affects OSX Too


  2. No, I Don't Trust You! -- One of the Most Alarming Internet Proposals I've Ever Seen
    If you care about Internet security, especially what we call "end-to-end" security free from easy snooping by ISPs, carriers, or other intermediaries, heads up! You'll want to pay attention to this.

    You'd think that with so many concerns these days about whether the likes of AT&T, Verizon, and other telecom companies can be trusted not to turn our data over to third parties whom we haven't authorized, that a plan to formalize a mechanism for ISP and other "man-in-the-middle" snooping would be laughed off the Net.

    But apparently the authors of IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) Internet-Draft "Explicit Trusted Proxy in HTTP/2.0" (14 Feb 2014) haven't gotten the message.

    What they propose for the new HTTP/2.0 protocol is nothing short of officially sanctioned snooping.


  3. relayd SSL interception
    This mail includes a quite detailed explanation of the attached diff that adds support for SSL Interception ("SSL-MITM") to relayd. If you don't want to read the story, just skip to the configuration example and diff below.


  4. Debian: 2862-1: chromium-browser: Multiple vulnerabilities


  5. Debian: 2861-1: file: denial of service


Recent Techrights' Posts

BetaNews Has More or Less Died After Experiments With LLM Slop, Is Linuxsecurity Next?
It doesn't seem like BetaNews knows what it's doing, let alone what it talks about
Links 13/06/2025: Journalists Targeted by Cracking, China-Japan and Israel-Iran Tensions Grow
Links for the day
 
Links 14/06/2025: Wars and L.A. Distortion Effect
Links for the day
Gemini Links 14/06/2025: Historic Ada Design and GeminiSpace.Club to Expire
Links for the day
Links 14/06/2025: India Plane Crash and Middle-Eastern War
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 13, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, June 13, 2025
Gemini Links 13/06/2025: (Not)virtues and Project Yeet Broadband
Links for the day
Links 13/06/2025: US Reduces Nonessential Staff at Baghdad Embassy Ahead of Strikes in Iran, Invasion of California Debated
Links for the day
X11 is Free Software
Whether you agree (e.g. on politics) with the person/s forking it doesn't matter
The More Time Passes, the Better Our Advice on Social Control Media Seems
At the end of the day, any platform you do not control yourself is working for someone else
Twitter (X) is Dying, Now It's Just Like a Mafia-Type Operation of the Man Who Does Nazi Salutes in Public
a form of extortion
UK High Court Blasts Brett Wilson LLP for Misusing "GDPR" After Failed Efforts to Censor Critics Using 'Libel' Claims
No wonder this firm is rapidly shrinking
Recent Blunders in Microsoft GitHub (e.g. Slop-Generated Bug Reports or GPL Violations 'as a Service') Taking Their Toll?
Put bluntly, if you still use Microsoft GitHub, then you're slave to Microsoft
American Imperialism and Microsoft Plagiarism
Techrights will therefore do what Microsoft does not want it to do: it'll write even more about Microsoft
When They Have Nothing Left to Help Advance Abusive Litigation for Microsoft People... Other Than Throwing ~500 Pages of Someone Else's Work Into a PDF
Microsoft is having a very tough year
The Price of Exposing Corruption in Poland (and Elsewhere)
It's easier to participate in corruption than to merely do the right thing and oppose it
Slopwatch and Yet More Holes in 'Secure Boot' (as Usual!), Promoted Inside Linux by the Man We Are Suing
Today's Slopwatch will be short
Gemini Links 13/06/2025: People You've Left Behind, Life Update and OS Changes
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, June 12, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, June 12, 2025
Links 12/06/2025: Portland Homeless Deaths Quadruple, COVID Cases Surge in Asia
Links for the day
Abuse Inside the Polish Patent Office (UPRP) - Part IX: Minimum Wages For You (Experienced Scientist), Alicante/EU Paydays For Me (Unproductive, Corrupt Official)
Does UPRP maladministration extend to the false belief that qualified and experienced scientists can play the role of circus clowns?
"The Liberating Power of Simply Telling People the Truth."
'polite' bullying
Who Imitates Who? Plagiarist as Client (From Microsoft), 'Plagiarism' at the Law Firm?
let's revisit the subject
EPO's Gareth Lord Asked About "Quality and Productivity" or, Put Another Way, Why the EPO Keeps Granting So Many Invalid/Illegal Patents
letter to Lord
EPO's Central Staff Committee (CSC) Scrutinises the Man Who Illegally Grants (and Forces Others to Illegally Participate in Granting) Software Patents in Europe
EPO compels examiners to break the law in the name of obeying illegal "rules" or "orders"
The Latest Rumour Says The Next (as Correctly Predicted Before) Wave of Layoffs at Microsoft is 3 Weeks Away, "Larger Than the First Wave"
Step 2
TV Licensing Used to SPAM Your Postbox, Now It Does the Same to E-mail
First they ask for your E-mail address; then they start nagging you via E-mail
The Toxic Playbook
Either you support Prince Mohammed bin Salman or you're a nazi
It's Possible That BetaNews Got Cracked, But Nobody Talks About It, The Site Contains an Outdated Old Image, No Activity
It's possible that they will never explain what happened to the site and users' accounts
Links 12/06/2025: Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson Dies
Links for the day
Gemini Links 12/06/2025: Video Game Diegesis and Steam Next Fest
Links for the day
Why the Militants Have Lost Every Battle Since 2022 (When Attacking My Wife and I in Various Ways, Even Attacking Our Employers)
This takes patience, sure, but at the end most evildoers face the consequences for their actions
Our Priority is Still Tackling Software Patents and Corruption in Patent Offices
Meanwhile we got compliments on our recent articles, which means that they are effective
Politics Will Impact Software Choices
Will those systems respect users' freedom?
EPO: Neglecting Children to Promote American Monopolies by Shielding Them From European Competition
Yesterday the Central Staff Committee at the EPO spoke about another "reform" at the Office
Slopwatch: Another Day, Another Slopfest, LLM Slop Scrapers Slow Down Our Site
We too have some slop issues; this past day this site and the sister site had to answer about 2.5 million requests (not counting Gemini Protocol) and it's slowing things down for everybody
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, June 11, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, June 11, 2025