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Comment by prmoustache | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't limit that to OSS projects. How many of them managed to get hired and are working for Microsoft, Apple, Google, Oracle or Amazon?

In some cases they don't even need to introduce backdoors themselves but just review and spot bugs they don't correct or raise issues for but communicate to mothership. They could even work in team with having one building the backdoor and the other approving the code.

Most companies have more thorough processes to avoid this but that doesn't mean those processes are applied correctly everytime, especially if more than one malicious engineer is involved.

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I'm now imagining a department where every single worker is a spy for different government and they play endless game of "add exploit, close off the other people's exploits". And all of them think they are the 10x developer because all the other people do in their view is pushing shoddy code

I worked on a project just like this once.. a mobile phone network build in the middle east before the arab spring. 10/10 would not repeat the experience.

Most of the time they don't need infiltrators. Governments can just pressure companies with export controls or warrantless surveillance to get backdoors into commercial systems. OSS projects require different methods because the more direct method would be discarded by the community and forked.

> Most of the time they don't need infiltrators. Governments can just pressure companies with export controls or warrantless surveillance to get backdoors into commercial systems.

Or they simply pay companies with a “support contract” in return for embedding spyware that sells out customers. Seen that first hand (private key exfiltration), resigned the same day.

Lots of comments saying we need to do something about the OSS supply chain but in my estimation the problem is much worse with closed source commercial software.

> I wouldn't limit that to OSS projects. How many of them managed to get hired and are working for Microsoft, Apple, Google, Oracle or Amazon?

They don't have to sneak into those companies tho, they just hand over something like a national security letter and do whatever they want while making it clear to the heads of the company that anyone who talks or pushes back will rot in gitmo. Why wouldn't there be at least an equivalent to Room 641A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) in every major US corporation that deals with massive amounts of people's sensitive data and communication?

> Most companies have more thorough processes to avoid this but that doesn't mean those processes are applied correctly everytime, especially if more than one malicious engineer is involved.

I’d also bet that you could exploit the tiers at many companies: how many places have more robust review for the staff engineers but then assume that some lowly “ops monkey” will take care of the build environment, etc.? I’d hope that wouldn’t work at Google, Microsoft, etc. but have heard enough stories about disparities between which jobs are contracted out and which have the coveted FAANG benefits that I wouldn’t exactly be shocked if it turned out otherwise.

Deleted.

The thing is they only need one member sometimes, to observe what is in use.

Example scenario: "malicious engineer in say Microsoft, finds out that office365 is using xz internally and the library is pulled directly without code review. Same engineer or another member of same group would be that Jia Tan doing the necessary backdooring in xz to target office365. And bam all worlwide Office365 accounts would be backdoored."

I am not saying Office365 is using xz, I have no idea really, but this would be a possible scenario. I know MsTeams is using ffmpeg for example.

So I think having this discussion while only scoping linux distributions is a big mistake. xz project was particularly interesting as a target as it is distributed under BSD zero-close license, which is pretty much a public domain license. You don't have the attribution part of the BSD license so there are probably myriads of proprietary software using it too without them acknowledging it.

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