this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
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    Kinda sus... (lemmy.world)
    submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
    73 comments fedilink hide all child comments
     

    The NSA, the original primary developer of SELinux, released the first version to the open source development community under the GNU GPL on December 22, 2000.[6] The software was merged into the mainline Linux kernel 2.6.0-test3, released on 8 August 2003. Other significant contributors include Red Hat, Network Associates, Secure Computing Corporation, Tresys Technology, and Trusted Computer Solutions.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux

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    [–] [email protected] 28 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    So it would be pretty hard for them to hide a backdoor or something??

    It happens, though.

    [–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    This is also probably the reason why you lost your DARPA funding, they more than likely caught wind of the fact that those backdoors were present and didn't want to create any derivative products based upon the same.

    Though this implies that the Department of Defense doesn't want to use compromised tools, since DARPA is DoD. NSA is also DoD.

    [–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

    They wouldn't want to use or derive any compromised software themselves. They would want any adversaries to have it implemented.

    [–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

    I did some follow-up research and found that subsequent audits found no backdoors. They're either incredibly sneaky, or the person making these claims wasn't being entirely honest.

    [–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    Do you know of any good comprehensive followup to this? A quick search shows me lots of outdated info and inconclusive articles. Do you know if they conclusively found anything or if there is a good writeup on the whole situation?

    [–] MajorHavoc 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

    I don't have such a source, but the Cybersecurity community throw accusations around easily, and are loathe to ever bless any software as completely innocent - which is a good thing.

    When the accusations stop, the issue has either been addressed (typical outcome), or the product owner was written off by the Cybersecurity community as a lost cause (rare, but it happens).

    [–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    People don't understand that the way a backdoor is usually implemented is not going to be obviously saying "backdoor_here", neither it will look like a some magic code loading a large string and unzipping it on the fly -- that's sus af. What you will see is some "play video" functionality that has a very subtle buffer overflow bug that's also not trivially triggerable.

    This already happened with WhatsApp.

    [–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

    Honestly I think a lot of backdoors are just unintentionally exploits that are not disclosed