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I’ve worked for Cisco for 11 years (both TAC and R&D) and this anecdote is ridiculous. There is no such special back door for TAC. It would be stupidly incompe
by noncoml 2y ago
I’ve worked for Cisco for 11 years (both TAC and R&D) and this anecdote is ridiculous.
There is no such special back door for TAC. It would be stupidly incompetent if NSA would allow Cisco to use their back door for their own convenience.
Also there is no back door visible in the source code. Again it would be stupid if there was since there are tens of thousands of engineers looking at the code that could decide to take advantage of it for their own benefit.
If there is an NSA back door only very few select people in Cisco know about it.
- oyashirochama 2y agoIf there's an NSA backdoor, the NSA wouldn't let a corporation even know about it.
- jijijijij 2y agoIIRC the documented incidents from the Snowden files were about hardware backdoors/additions added in transit. But they required CISCO to turn a blind eye, at the very least, I think.
- jiggawatts 2y agoJuniper included the back-doored EC-DRBG algorithm into their VPN products on the orders of the NSA, so this kind of behaviour is not without precedent. Unless you're a very senior staff member, at the director level, you would not be privy to these kinds of orders. It would implemented without the knowledge of the vast majority of the staff. Your ignorance of a backdoor is not evidence of its absence.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sekh60 2y agoThat was kinda their point. They weren't denying that one exists, just pointing out that the Cisco response that it was for support use was laughable.
- jiggawatts 2y agoCisco never claimed it was for support use. It was more than some support techs knew about the back door, and were using it unofficially for their own convenience. The official statement, if I remember correctly, was brief, vaguely worded, and amount to: "We can't say anything, every US vendor is in the same boat as us, stop asking".