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Does the CIA need to weaken encryption? Don’t they have backdoors or front doors into each operating system connected to the power grid?
by Condition1952 3y ago
Does the CIA need to weaken encryption? Don’t they have backdoors or front doors into each operating system connected to the power grid?
- RIMR 3y agoNo, lol. They don't. Maybe Windows, because Microsoft doesn't seem to care much about privacy, but Apple doesn't mess around. And if there were backdoors in Linux, we'd definitely know about it, because people are actively looking for stuff like that.
- Sporktacular 3y agoThis is just wrong. Apple's public position could differ from its actual one. And Hiding a backdoor (or hiding with the deniability of an innocent bug) in open source is possible. "we'd definitely know about it" is not how security works.
- RIMR 3y agoThere have been exhaustive third party reviews of the Linux kernel, nothing is impossible, but a government backdoor would be extremely hard to hide from the level of scrutiny that codebase is put under. I would certainly consider it unlikely enough that any suggestion to the contrary, without evidence, is just a conspiracy theory.
- Try1275 3y agoCould there be a backdoor on the hardware level?
- RIMR 3y agoI mean, yes, as we have already agreed, anything is possible, but I'm not in the business of believing things without evidence.
- Sporktacular 3y ago"we'd definitely know about it". Yes, but extremely hard is not the same as impossible. How many security 'bugs' can we be sure were unintentional? This is not just semantics. Complacency can come from over-confidence.
- monocasa 3y agoThe CIA's hacking tools were leaked in the Vault 7 leaks from WikiLeaks. They were fairly amateurish. The nearest component was some 0 days for smart tvs to turn them into wiretaps. It seems like the NSA really does get the focus for signals intelligence.
- Canada 3y agoIf those were amateur what does professional look like?