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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

You didn't respond to the substance of his objection. The problem with the "NSA backdoor" hypothesis is that it doesn't make logistical sense: it requires the NSA to already have installed software on the victim's computer. If the NSA has installed software on your machine that it can control, you are going to, in the parlance of our times, "get Mossad'd".

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Of course, of course, this is unlikely to be an NSA backdoor. But maybe .... </CK_LOUIS>

i dabbled in this api way back in the past so i may be wrong about its capabilities.

skype used to be EXCELLENT at working in most networks, including "locked down" corporate ones. Network admins used to find it notoriously difficult to "ban" on networks.

so relying on skype to exfiltrate info may serve two purposes:

1) use another program's capabilities instead of reinventing the wheel.

2) hide the fact that some random program is doing network access.

skype could be one of a range of data exfiltration mechanisms with different levels of obfuscation.

> it doesn't make logistical sense: it requires the NSA to already have installed software on the victim's computer.

Well, if you have any of the closed-source companies' software on your system (and by definition, that is +/- 310mio citizens, in the US alone), you are sure to have NSA backdoors on your system. Such backdoors certainly do not require manual intervention for them to be exploited on large scale.

Explain?

No one outside of the software provider can audited the code, and presumably even they haven't audited the code. Recently there was the source code backdoor that was suspected to had been placed inside Juniper routers by the NSA. If I remember correctly, it wasn't found because it was hidden on a high right column.

The Juniper backdoor was a bit particular in that it was known that the code in question had been developed and distributed by the NSA. It's more of a stretch to accuse every single vendor of proprietary code in the USA of building NSA back doors into their products. It would require the knowing assistance of tens of thousands of people across those companies.

My point was that you don't actually know, and you don't technically need all the vendors. Just the big ones, and there's not really that many. Even more to the point, you don't even need all of the big ones, just the ones on the biggest network, which honestly probably just one vendor on the whole network due to volume purchase discounts and interoperability concerns.

But more to the point, you don't know what's going on in closed source code. It's trust. However the trust can, and has been violated in the past (whether by the provider or by a third party is immaterial). You just don't know. Now that doesn't mean that open source software is immune. I seem to remember there was a backdoor found in the Linux kernel a few years ago. These things happen, but at least it's easier to audit.

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