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Comment by _lvbh | Hacker News Reader

Nothing but praise for Ghidra. It’s very powerful and intuitive to use. I’m still stunned that the NSA contributed to the public for once

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You might be familiar with NSA as an offensive agency interested in subverting security systems, but it's actually composed of two separate and often warring divisions, the second of which is defensive in nature and is interested in securing systems. It is this second division which has a history of contributing in good faith to security projects, public and otherwise.

Which one is responsible for their bad faith, public, defensive contributions?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG

That seems offensive.

I thought the offensive part of the NSA was the part that was capturing encrypted Internet traffic to later decrypt.

offensive, in the sense that breaking key cryptograph would allow them into (foreign) systems.

defensive in the sense that the block access into (American gov & private sector) systems via things like SELinux

>I’m still stunned that the NSA contributed to the public for once

They contributed SELinux too and sponsored the TrustedBSD Project.

As good as SELinux and TrustedBSD are, I wouldn't expect them to be any sort of defense against the NSA. I wouldn't expect them to publish anything that they can't already own when they want to.

The only thing that can protect you from state actors is a one-way data diode, and/or a complete air gap system with rigorous physical security AKA another state...and even then...spies ;)

The NSA has contributed many things such as SELinux and more.

They also contributed Apache NiFi but that was much earlier: https://nifi.apache.org/

what you don't want all their crypto libraries? As targeted as go, this is right up there.

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