Re:Firebird: Historical Reference (2011)
by squarefoot on Friday October 25, 2019 @08:33PM
(#21360648)
An often forgotten piece of history about Firebird is that it demonstrated how Open Source (Free Software, etc.) makes products more secure and trustworthy.
Long story short: Interbase was a closed source DB by Borland that contained a backdoor which would give full access to all data to an external attacker. The backdoor went unnoticed for roughly 7 years, then one day Borland released the Interbase sources and just before the new management closed it again and ceased any contribution to the code, the community forked it on Sourceforge naming it Firebird. Within a few months since the code was made public, the 7 years old backdoor was identified and fixed.
Long story short: Interbase was a closed source DB by Borland that contained a backdoor which would give full access to all data to an external attacker. The backdoor went unnoticed for roughly 7 years, then one day Borland released the Interbase sources and just before the new management closed it again and ceased any contribution to the code, the community forked it on Sourceforge naming it Firebird. Within a few months since the code was made public, the 7 years old backdoor was identified and fixed.
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2001-0008
Why "was"? Nowadays it's not?