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Re:Multiple 7-Zip Vulnerabilities Discovered by striking on Thursday May 12, 2016 @04:48PM (#11686671)
I'm glad you care so much, but I don't think you can fix a culture issue by explaining it away. The best way to set a culture where there hasn't been one before, is to lead by example.

Re: side note; the vulnerability described in the well-known Ken Thompson paper has been exploited just once in the wild. It's cool, but you could say the same thing about trusting Windows or proprietary drivers or hardware.

Re:Multiple 7-Zip Vulnerabilities Discovered by nickpsecurity on Thursday May 12, 2016 @05:03PM (#11686768)
I counter the Thompson claim as vastly overstated risk when I see it here. I hadn't even heard that it was ever done before. Do you have a link or the project/time? I try to track these things.
Re:Multiple 7-Zip Vulnerabilities Discovered by striking on Thursday May 12, 2016 @05:20PM (#11686869)
Re:Multiple 7-Zip Vulnerabilities Discovered by nickpsecurity on Thursday May 12, 2016 @05:33PM (#11686931)
Thanks for digging. I'll be damned! Somebody did pull it off. On my old, favorite platform as well!? So, one time on record.

Still supports my claim that reproducible builds and Thompson are mainstream buzzwords where our real concern per Orange Book days should be: coding defects in compiler source; effects of optimizations; malicious developers; trusted distribution of source; bootstrapping first, verified, local compiler. That's basically a human and machine verified compiler with simple code and signed zip's. Knocks out Thompson attack as side effect and negates reptoducible build need except for debugging.

Re:Multiple 7-Zip Vulnerabilities Discovered by paulfr on Thursday May 12, 2016 @06:03PM (#11687151)
I'm not talking about a "trusting trust" attack, which is difficult to pull off and requires special compiler knowledge because it needs to survive bootstrapping.

Here the attacker just needs to patch a binary once and he already has complete control over the machine, so he has an infinite number of options: from simply manually replacing the binary file before it's uploaded to the website, to replacing gcc with a script that patches the source code before calling the original gcc.