Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3100 mails)

[Anders Johansson <andjoh@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday 24 March 2006 21:52, Orn E. Hansen wrote:
>   Backdoors have been notorious in Unix systems.  I've got one notorious
> one in mind, that was inbedded into the C compiler itself when compiling
> "login.c".
[...]
>   Has little to do with the design of the system.  It has a lot more to do
> with how the Linux community is, as in open source and regular updates.  A
> program pretending to be "bash" shell for example, is not going to live
> long, because its going to be removed and reinstalled pretty regularly. 
> And trying to put something inside a ".profile" script or similar, is
> likely to be discovered as most Linux users are enthusiasts that are
> fiddling with these things all the time.  As in this community a source
> code is likely to be scrutinized by many, especially on volatile systems.

I believe you were referring to this:

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

and one of Thompson's points was that you can't even trust the source

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