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Does any private Microsoft/Google/Apple/whatever program have any backdoors? We don’t know and we will never know. At least with open source we are able to det
by dakiol 3y ago
Does any private Microsoft/Google/Apple/whatever program have any backdoors? We don’t know and we will never know.
At least with open source we are able to detect them.
- microtonal 3y agoI don't think this is necessarily true. People do a lot of reverse engineering of proprietary OSes and a lot of vulnerabilities are found that way (besides fuzzing). And the tooling for reverse engineering is only getting better. Also, let's not forget that this particular backdoor was initially found through behavioral analysis, not by reading the source code. I think Linus' law "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" has been refuted. Discovering bugs does not scale linearly with eyeballs, you need the right eyeballs. And the right eyeballs are often costly. If your implicit premise that having the source code available makes it easier to analyze code than closed source, you can also flip the argument around: it is easier for bad actors to find exploitable vulnerabilities because the source code is available. (Note: I am a staunch supported of FLOSS, but for different reasons, such as empowerment and freedom.)
- shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y agoYes, and they are eventually discovered by reverse engineering. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY