Does this place have a backdoor?

Saturday, March 4. 2006

Does this place have a backdoor?

CNet is reporting
Microsoft: Vista won't get a backdoor

I admit that I believe them. Putting a backdoor into an encryption system is a bad idea, but this brings up a very important point. How do we know?

If I run open source software and I am worried that there is a backdoor in an application, I can look at the source and find out. When you run a closed source application, there is no way you can tell.

Posted by Josh Bressers in Security at 08:37 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

No Trackbacks

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

This would be true if you provided a way to validate that an installed binary rpm was built from a given source rpm.

#1 Anonymous on 2006-03-04 17:46 (Reply)

You are correct. Anytime you don't build the source yourself, there is a certain level of trust that must exist between yourself and the organization creating the binary.

#1.1 Josh Bressers (Homepage) on 2006-03-04 18:27 (Reply)

Even if we have the source, do we really know?

http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/

#2 Doug Porter (Homepage) on 2006-03-05 18:23 (Reply)

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to
Comment	Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (word), underscore are made via _word_. Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above: BBCode format allowed
	Remember Information? Subscribe to this entry