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Assuming it could be proven, surely? And there have to be limitations as to how far an individual could go as to subterfuge, so if your company enforces a 2-pe
by maldeh 8y ago
Assuming it could be proven, surely?
And there have to be limitations as to how far an individual could go as to subterfuge, so if your company enforces a 2-person code review and there aren't other authorized Australian nationals at hand, you could point at process preventing you from doing so without others' knowledge (how naive this defense is, I have no idea)
- int_19h 8y agoYou opt into participating that process by accepting the job, though. So from Australia's perspective, the way to comply with their law is to not take such jobs, and to leave if the process changes prevent you from complying.
- viraptor 8y agoI think you're inventing scenarios here that are too unlikely even for a pretty corrupt country. There probably exist laws in a number of countries which would technically jail you for taking some not-explicitly-illegal job. But this is absurd. Unless you're an actual lawyer giving opinion here?
- Nasrudith 8y agoI think if you trust people to not be corrupt you will wind up with corruption. A bad law is one that requires the empowered to not abuse it. A good law can't be abused. Harsh and cynical but true - reducto ad absurdum giving someone the legal power to murder anyone and relying on it to "not be abused" is a law literally bad enough to be causus beli for a civil war.
- bryanrasmussen 8y agoUnless you're an Australian lawyer I'm going to think this interpretation is a little far out by most Western legal traditions.
- int_19h 8y agoCan you explain why? It seems like a straightforward application of the law making some activity illegal, when its jurisdiction is explicitly defined as extending beyond the nation's borders. If you forget the border for a moment and just consider it all a single jurisdiction, aren't you basically saying that somebody can break the law and claim immunity from prosecution on the basis that their job requirements demanded that law to be broken?
- bryanrasmussen 8y agoWhat I expect would happen is as follows: 1. you take job at place with code review. 2. Australian police say place a backdoor. 3. You say we have code review the backdoor will be caught. Now at this point the following might happen. 4a. make sure your code is reviewed by X. 4b. ok I guess it won't work. 4c. here is the code to put in, it has a very hard to catch bug that we can exploit. in no way would I expect them to say 4d. well we're going to take you to court because you took a job that makes entering backdoors difficult. on edit: improved formatting on 2nd edit: I removed the leading No but, because I can't remember why I started off with that.
- _Nat_ 8y agoIs there a protection that prevents the government from requiring an employee take an action that may be discovered? Or even a reason? I mean, unless the backdoor has a hard-coded URL like `www.ThisIsAGovernmentBackdoor.gov.au`, then a backdoor wouldn't seem to automatically implicate the government. Then an employer might well assume that the employee is just doing their own hacking. And presumably the employee can't say otherwise, right? Or does the law say that employees can refuse if they fear discovery? And if so, couldn't employees always just refuse on that basis?
- bryanrasmussen 8y agoI'm not saying the employees can refuse, I'm saying the employees can say I will be discovered because of this reason. I naively suppose the police are like me in that they do things with a purpose in mind, and if they cannot achieve their purpose by an action they refrain from it as a waste of energy. If their purpose is to hack company X, are informed that the way they intend to do it will be discovered and expose the tool they were going to use, then I expect they would refrain from doing that and try to find some other way. If they do not refrain then their purpose must not be to hack company X but really just to expose the tool for some reason. However if they just say I will likely be discovered because of this reason, the police will probably just say "that's a risk we're willing to take!" and go for it.
- adrianN 8y agoThe obfuscated C coding contest shows that you probably won't catch backdoors with code reviews
- mcv 8y agoObfuscated code shouldn't pass code review.
- GorgeRonde 8y agoMaybe the poster above was referring to the Underhanded C Contest > The Underhanded C Contest is an annual contest to write innocent-looking C code implementing malicious behavior. In this contest you must write C code that is as readable, clear, innocent and straightforward as possible, and yet it must fail to perform at its apparent function. To be more specific, it should perform some specific underhanded task that will not be detected by examining the source code. Source: http://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_2.html http://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_2.html
- Klathmon 8y agoI highly encourage everyone to go look at the hall of fame, it was extremely eye opening when I first did! Even knowing there is an exploit in the code, I probably would never be able to find most of them. My favorite is 2008's winner who's goal is to write a redaction program to redact text. It doesn't use any buffer/array hacks, the code is very straightforward and simple and small, and it would work in languages other than C. It's a terrifying example of how easy it is to write malicious code that would pass multiple code reviews but still has a backdoor! http://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_17.html http://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_17.html
- LifeLiverTransp 8y agoI bet Zero day backdoors are the retirement plan of half the security relevant coders here.