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...
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.