this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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Backdoors (lemmy.ml)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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https://wetdry.world/@cyrus/112186279067271067

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (2 children)

OP is referring to a backdoor that was found. It apparently modified behaviour in a way that was noticeable to humans, suggesting that it was built by an unskilled adversary.

It's a safe bet that there are others (in FOSS) that remain undiscovered. We know that skilled adversaries can produce pretty amazing attacks (e.g. stuxnet), so it seems likely that similar vulnerabilities remain in other FOSS packages.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Stuxnet was done by a literal army assembled by state actors with massive funding hoarding zero days. If an attack like that came at you there is very little you can do.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

It’s a safe bet that there are others (in FOSS) that remain undiscovered.

I agree, but I don't think that image (about survivors' bias) applies to the op meme then, as that would imply that it only seems like open source backdoors are convoluted because we've not found the simple/obvious ones

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not. This can lead to incorrect conclusions because of incomplete data.

In this case, the selection process is discovering human-evident back doors. It fits by my reading.