/johnny
A very clever backdoor indeed. Good plausible deniability too, since this is such a common typo for C programmers, and one that isn’t even caught by syntax checkers, since it is still perfectly valid syntax. If they ever did track down who inserted it, they couldn’t prove that someone didn’t just “goof up” and forget the second equal sign.
Yep. I looked right at it and didn’t see it. BTT
someone should have tested it with the __WCLONE option at least once to see if it returned -EINVAL
was it caught by unit testing? if not, it should have been
could have been sloppy code. that wouldn’t surprise me. better hacks involve pts to functions buried in hex tables of object code
The fact that it was slipped in without approval would draw attention to it.
A smart hacker would realize that.
It’s pretty “ambitous” for a hacker to think they can get a backdoor into code that’s reviewed publicly.
If something is going to slip through, it would have to be very subtle, most certainly involving the interaction between different parts of the system, and these would be probably be maintained by different people.
There was not any sophistication to this attempt.
IMHO, it was either very halfhearted, sort of just poking around, or attempted by someone who’s rather half-witted.
Much more effective hacking would be to not try to put an explicit backdoor into Linux itself but to hack one machine at a time the old fashioned way, using the tools available and inherent weaknesses they imply.
Of course, once an individual computer is compromised, malware can be used for all sorts of things.
Linux, for example, as things like tcpdump that root can use to grab any or all network traffic using only a script, not even compiled programs.
Possibly one of the most interesting articles I’ve ever read on FR! I wonder what Linus would say about this.
Certainly in 2013 Obama would ‘back door’ any opportunity he can.