Alleged backdoor in OpenBSD's IPSEC implementation.

Wed Dec 15 19:02:15 UTC 2010

> > More to the point, I think it wouldn't be an NDA, but a security
> > classification on the knowledge of the backdoors, and probably one not
> > subject to automatic downgrading.
> 
> Please pardon my ignorance on the matter as I am not involved in any way
> with Open Source development, but it stands to reason that anything of this
> sort would have been scrutinized by the many developers involved with
> OpenBSD and surely would have been discovered at some point.  And to further
> that point, is this not something that can be verified now if this code is
> still in the public domain?  Or is writing a crypto stack such an esoteric
> task that only a relegated few can possibly decipher the inner workings? 

See Ken Thompson's classic paper "Reflections on trusting trust",

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backdoor_(computing)#Reflections_on_Trusting_Trust

http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

> Not that I don't love a good government conspiracy theory, and yes I do
> believe there are a fair amount of backdoors in most code (including that of
> many private and publicly held corporations)... but open source?  Just seems
> unlikely to me based on my limited understanding...

The world is not that simple.

Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug at nethelp.no