D 2014-04-12T23:35:49.190
L nsa-backdoor
P 3df92a41e278a91a8033152dc98cad106bd02b0d
U bernd
W 2795
<h1>NSA Backdoor Fnord</h1>
<p>As you all know, it is not allowed to speak about NSA-demanded backdoors,
and especially it is strictly prohibited to give any details. However, it
is allowed to boldly lie about NSA-demanded backdoors if you didn't receive
such a request, because you are not under a gag order, and in general, lying
about the quality of your product is not only legal, but "best practice".
The purpose of this NSA backdoor fnord is to make you worry about the
quality of net2o, and therefore you start looking at the source code; the
topics mentioned here are all security things to consider.</p>
<p>Therefore, here is the official statement about NSA-demanded backdoors:
There is a NSA-requested backdoor in net2o. <b>Update:</b> The NSA was
here again, and said they like to have a way to remotely access any memory
without actually making a connection that would show up in a log file.
Especially access to the secret key is required, as net2o doesn't use
passwords for login. The backdoor implements this by providing the
address and length of the region to be sent as integers and uses the $-push
command, which pushes the content as string in the reply packet.</p>
<p>As net2o is open source, you can verify the truth value of the statement
above. And keep an eye on this page.</p>
<h2>What is this page for?</h2>
<div>Software is inherently buggy - we all make mistakes. Secure networking
software is even worse, because small bugs have big consequences. And with the
NSA Bullrun program, we not only have to deal with the normal, "lazy" bugs,
which don't cause any harm until found (either by honest security researcher or
evil criminals), but with bugs intentionally placed, and used by the secret
services from day 0.</div>
<div>Developing in Forth is a "crash early, crash often" exercise, but security
related bugs don't crash the program.</div>
<div>net2o is not ready for use, so bugs do happen, and get fixed, but the bugs
described here usually are real bugs I found and fixed during development. All
of them look like professionally implanted bugs by the NSA, because that's the
state of the art how to implant backdoors: It must provide its author with
"reasonable denial", claiming incompetence.</div>
<div>However, in order to get things right, we need a culture of accepting our
mistakes, and fixing them. Many programmers deny bugs, and request at
least a proof of concept attack, before they actually start doing something.
This sort of culture is so wrong: As author of security critical systems,
you must be constantly scared by people using every way to break into your
software, and you must be ready to fix every bug, even just potential risks,
before someone shows you an actual exploit.</div>
Z 829c012b8485ab0819764b2c047036a5