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Re:Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool by bryanrasmussen on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @03:44AM (#19317333)
Even if it is open source, I might worry about using an open source tool from the NSA.
Re:Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool by OskarS on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @03:51AM (#19317366)
Yeah, my mouse was hovering over the download button eager to test it out when my brain suddenly went "wait, don't do that!"

If you wanna run this thing, you should probably build it from source yourself (don't trust the binaries) and even then run it in a pretty well sandboxed virtual machine. I would not be surprised at all if the NSA left some surprises in that thing.

Re:Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool by doktrin on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @09:54AM (#19319297)
> I would not be surprised at all if the NSA left some surprises in that thing.

Huh. I would be extremely surprised if the NSA were to include some kind of malicious or pseudo-malicious easter egg in the open source RE toolkit they're releasing. How dumb would they have to be to pull a move like that, and for what? The self interest just doesn't line up.

Re:Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool by Goz3rr on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @05:14AM (#19317778)
I hope you don't use Linux, because the NSA contributes to quite a lot of OSS. They also created SELinux for instance.
Re:Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool by mattigames on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @07:55AM (#19318504)
Those changes on OSS are reviewed by a lot of people, this here is just released and reviewed by themselves only.
Re:Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @09:39AM (#19319195)
Sure, the ones officially contributed by the NSA. What you have to wonder is how much code was contributed by some seemingly normal community member that is actually a front for the NSA to introduce subtly flawed code that they can use to their advantage while being plausibly just a bug?

There are those who suspect Heartbleed came about this way.

Re:Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool by AsyncAwait on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @08:29AM (#19318702)
- SELinux has been free-software for over a decade, with many open-source contributions.

- Many people don't use SELinux, especially on distros like Arch, Gentoo etc. where it (luckily) doesn't come as part of the package, SELinux is far from universal.

Re:Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool by dingaling on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @09:29AM (#19319132)
If you're decompiling and analysing ANYTHING, you should be running it on a reflashable, airgapped machine in case it does something unexpected, even if it isn't intentionally malicious. Plus you probably don't want it phoning-home either...
Re:Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool by pbhjpbhj on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @04:43AM (#19317596)
Maybe it's all just an elaborate recruitment ad. :)