On Tuesday 25 February 2003 00:41, zentara wrote:
Don't sweat yet, it's still very hard to do, and you are more likely to get a worm or trojan from precompiled rpm's from unknown sources. I worry alot about that. I assume the big distributions are pretty honest, but they could easily slip back doors into their rpms if they wanted( or were secretly asked to by governments, in the "interest of national security", of course.).
If they do try it, they will probably do a very good job of it, since they aren't hackers, they can afford the best programmers. So things would be well hidden, and you would have to be very smart to detect it. Probably alot of assembly level stuff, writing invisible files to empty disk space, and reading it off when you go online. Hmm, sounds like WindowsXP, :-).
Question... how could they do this and still get away with it... they have to provide the source code and it would only take someone to compile the source code and get different code to that supplied in the precompiled binary rpm for the gaff to be blown... If they provided the code with the actual back door in it then someone who was curious could easily stumble on it as well. Putting backdoors into an entirely binary, closed source, operating system is a whole different kettle of fish... -- Paul Cooke Registered Linux user 273897 Machine registration number 156819 Linux Counter: Home Page = http://counter.li.org/