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Re:Microsoft is Abandoning SHA-1 Hashes for Updates by techntoke on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @12:39AM (#19205828)
I think it would be quite the day to take the hashes of Microsoft's ISO images for Windows, and compare it with the source code to check if there is government backdoors in the code.
Re:Microsoft is Abandoning SHA-1 Hashes for Updates by craftyguy on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @12:54AM (#19205897)
> I think it would be quite the day to take the hashes of Microsoft's ISO images for Windows, and compare it with the source code

Wat? How would you translate an ISO hash into anything meaningful to compare to the actual source code (that you don't have access to, but that's beside the point) ?

Does microsoft enforce reproducible builds[0]? Even if they did, you couldn't reproduce it (no access to source). When you hash a large binary, like an ISO, you cannot deconstruct what, eh, sub-binaries it is made of, and you cannot magically decompile those, eh, sub-binaries into source code.

0. https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds

Re:Microsoft is Abandoning SHA-1 Hashes for Updates by anticensor on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @02:52PM (#19211352)
Microsoft enforces reproducible builds since 2017.
Re:Microsoft is Abandoning SHA-1 Hashes for Updates by craftyguy on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @09:18PM (#19213992)
Do you have a source for that (no pun intended)? Even if they did, it's impossible for anyone outside of microsoft to verify because, well, it's proprietary. So for those of us who trust microsoft as far as we can throw them, it doesn't really do much.
Re:Microsoft is Abandoning SHA-1 Hashes for Updates by anticensor on Thursday February 21, 2019 @03:40PM (#19220374)
Re:Microsoft is Abandoning SHA-1 Hashes for Updates by techntoke on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @11:09AM (#19208998)
Yes, you can take a look at the source code and recompile the ISO to match the hash. If the compiled ISO hash doesn't match, then it isn't the same code.
Re:Microsoft is Abandoning SHA-1 Hashes for Updates by craftyguy on Thursday February 21, 2019 @12:55AM (#19214860)
No, you can literally do none of that with microsoft software.
Re:Microsoft is Abandoning SHA-1 Hashes for Updates by TickleSteve on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @12:55AM (#19205900)
Thats not how backdoors work.

Backdoors are subtle bugs introduced into the existing codebase. They are compiled into the build.

They aren't added to the binary after the compilation by a malicious third party.

Re:Microsoft is Abandoning SHA-1 Hashes for Updates by bigiain on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @01:31AM (#19206049)
I'm not sure the term "backdoor" is that well defined.

In Ken Thompson's "Reflections On Trusting Trust" Turing award lecture from 1984, he talked about "trojan horses" being inserted into the compiler in such a way that any code run through the compiler results in a program that has behaviour which is unable to be determined from examining the source code.

They are "compiled into the build" by a malicious _compiler_, not from malicious bugs introduced into the source code.

It's quite obvious that such behaviours could easily be things which deserve the name "backdoor".

(It's only short, and _well_ worth the time needed to read it if you haven't come across it before: https://www.archive.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p7... )

Re:Microsoft is Abandoning SHA-1 Hashes for Updates by leeoniya on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @12:44AM (#19205861)
you can't even do that with their open source VSCode, since they add in branding/telemetry/licensing to the actual binaries they distribute. so you have forks that strip it out:

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium