On Fri, 6 Sep 2013 17:58:03 +0200 Heinz Diehl <htd@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 06.09.2013, Javier Perez wrote: > > > My beef is given the NSA origin of this software, It could very > > well have a backdoor to turn itself off under the appropriate > > circumstances like an NSA-sponsored breach an allow unrestricted > > access to my system.. > > Every person contributing to free open source software could do > that. You're talking about the NSA: they could easily pay > somebody to do that for them. Everybody with a lot of money could do > the same. If that's your concern, you can never ever be > shure, unless you have reviewed all of the sourcecode running on your > machine by yourself, and recompiled the software using this source > afterwards. That's not enough, because the compiler may be rigged to reintroduce backdoors straight into binaries. You need to check the compiler source code, and then bootstrap it from a simpler compiler that you have wrote yourself in machine code (and I mean machine code, not the assembly language). However, this also isn't good enough, since the bios, CPU (firmware and hardware in general) might have an undocumented set of instructions that can remotely trigger total control over the machine. It's quite simple, actually --- NSA pays some money to rig Intel, AMD, ARM and PPC architectures in this way, and they can access anything remotely. So in order to go around that, you need to build a computer yourself from scratch, in particular the CPU. After bootstraping Linux on that hardware (LFS distro comes to mind...), you're safe against the NSA. As for the tinfoil hat, it needs two layers --- the inside layer needs to be orientend shiny-side in, which would prevent the NSA from spying on your brain waves. But the outside layer needs to be oriented shiny-side out, to prevent the NSA from feeding your brain with undesired signals. The two layers need to be well insulated against each other --- it's obvious that a short-circuit between them will leave you completely vulnerable... HTH, :-) Marko -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
