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.
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Related/contextual items from the news:
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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.
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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.
