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Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

I doubt that if Google detected it with some internal tool, they'd reach out to Microsoft to hide their contribution.

It was reported by an MS engineer who happens to be involved in another OSS project. MS is doing business with the US intelligence community, for example there is the Skype story: First, rumors that NSA offers a lot of money for people who can break Skype's E2E encryption, then MS buys Skype, then MS changes Skype's client to not be E2E encrypted any more and to use MS servers instead of peer to peer, allowing undetectable wiretapping of arbitrary connections.

But it's a quite credible story too that it was just a random discovery. Even if it was the NSA, why would they hide that capability. It doesn't take much to run a script to compare git state with uploaded source tarballs in distros like Debian (Debian has separate tarballs for the source and the source with Debian patches applied).

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> It was reported by an MS engineer who happens to be involved in another OSS project.

I view it as being OSS or postgresql dev that happens to work at microsoft. I've been doing the former for much longer (starting somewhere between 2005 and 2008, depending on how you count) than the latter (2019-12).

Just wanted to say thank you for your work and attention to detail, it's immensely valuable and we're all very grateful for it.

Thanks for the explanation. Also thanks for catching this and protecting us all; I think in the end it's way more believable that you indeed found it on your own, above was just brainless blathering into the ether =). Lastly, thanks for your Postgres contributions.

Intelligence agencies are very careful about sharing their findings, even with "friends", because the findings will disclose some information about their capabilities and possibly methods.

Let's say agency A has some scanning capability on open source software that detected this backdoor attempt by agency B. If they had gone public, agency B now knows they have this ability. So agency B will adjust their ways the next time and the scanning capability becomes less useful. While if agency A had told Microsoft to "find" this by accident, nobody would know about their scanning capability. And the next attempt by agency B would only try to avoid having the performance impact this first attempt had, probably leaving it visible to agency A.

“Even if it was the NSA, why would they hide that capability”

Perhaps you’re not familiar with what NSA historically stood for: Never Say Anything.

Googling for "site:nsa.gov filetype:pdf" gives tens of thousands of results with documents produced by the NSA about various things (the google counter is known to lie but that's not my point). They do publish things.

> an MS engineer

no this engineer is world-known for being core PostgreSQL, a team with high standards.. unlike that company you mention

He is also one of the sharpest developers I have had the fortune to speak to (and do some minor work with on the mailing list) and he knows a lot about performance and profiling. I 100% think that he found it on his own. He would also be an odd choice for Microsoft to pick since I doubt he works anywhere close to any of their security teams (unless they went through some serious lengths to find just the guy where it would be 100% believable that he just stumbled on it).

Yeah definitely, good point. I got that wrong above: He is in fact a postgres contributor who happens to be MS employee and not an MS employee who happens to be a postgres contributor.

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