This would be my question. That seemingly small change has large security implications since it means that branch was disabled on certain erroneous conditions for some extended period of time and then silently changed back. I think you're right that Jason fixed it, but why wasn't it announced as a major security flaw in OpenBSD 3.0 which I believe released with this code?
Another spin on this drama could be either of these two:
1. Jason actually went in and fixed bugs placed by other NETSEC employees, and now is the victim of reprisals.
2. NETSEC was incompetent, not malicious, and then silently went around fixing things without telling anyone.
Interesting stuff, can't wait to see the rewrite of this file! :-)
It's unlikely that NETSEC would have had any management influence over Angelos during that work.
http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/open-sauce/43995-...
"Until 2 days ago I had no idea that both Jason and Angelos in the past did work for a company that does that business"
What the company did is surprising, not who worked there.
The bug happened during a change that simultaneously refactored and added a feature to OpenBSD's ESP code; a comparison that should have been == was instead !=; the "if" statement with the bug was originally and correctly !=, but should have been flipped based on how the code was refactored.
HD Moore may as we speak be going through the pain of reconstituting a nearly decade-old version of OpenBSD to verify the bug, but stipulate that it was there, and here's what you get: IPSEC ESP packet authentication was disabled if you didn't have hardware IPSEC. There is probably an elaborate man-in-the-middle scenario in which this could get you traffic inspection, but it's nowhere nearly as straightforward as leaking key bits.
To entertain the conspiracy theory, you're still suggesting that the FBI not only introduced this bug, but also developed the technology required to MITM ESP sessions, bouncing them through some secret FBI-developed middlebox.
One year later, Jason Wright from NETSEC (the company at the heart of the [I think silly] allegations about OpenBSD IPSEC backdoors) fixed the bug.
It's interesting that the bug was fixed without an advisory (oh to be a fly on the wall on ICB that day; Theo had a, um, a, "way" with his dev team). On the other hand, we don't know what releases of OpenBSD actually had the bug right now.
It seems vanishingly unlikely that there could have been anything deliberate about this series of changes. You are unlikely to find anyone who will impugn Angelos. Meanwhile, the diffs tell exactly the opposite of the story that Greg Perry told.