The NSA, the original primary developer of SELinux, released the first version to the open source development community under the GNU GPL on December 22, 2000.[6] The software was merged into the mainline Linux kernel 2.6.0-test3, released on 8 August 2003. Other significant contributors include Red Hat, Network Associates, Secure Computing Corporation, Tresys Technology, and Trusted Computer Solutions.
I mean, it’s still Open Source, right? So it would be pretty hard for them to hide a backdoor or something??
Right but maybe it combined with other tools they have is what helps them with some exploit.
Like they figured out an exploit but needed SELinux as a piece of the puzzle. It's open source
and we can all read the code but we can't see the other pieces of the puzzle.
I mean, they almost certainly have built in backdoors like IME. When you can force hardware manufacturers to add shit, you don't have to think up convoluted solutions like that.
I maintain open source software on a much smaller codebase that is less security critical. We have dozens of maintainers on a project with about 3k stars on GitHub. Stuff gets by that are potentially security vulnerabilities and we don’t know until upstream sources tell us there is a vulnerability
This is also probably the reason why you lost your DARPA funding, they more than likely caught wind of the fact that those backdoors were present and didn't want to create any derivative products based upon the same.
Though this implies that the Department of Defense doesn't want to use compromised tools, since DARPA is DoD. NSA is also DoD.
People don't understand that the way a backdoor is usually implemented is not going to be obviously saying "backdoor_here", neither it will look like a some magic code loading a large string and unzipping it on the fly -- that's sus af. What you will see is some "play video" functionality that has a very subtle buffer overflow bug that's also not trivially triggerable.
I did some follow-up research and found that subsequent audits found no backdoors. They're either incredibly sneaky, or the person making these claims wasn't being entirely honest.
Do you know of any good comprehensive followup to this? A quick search shows me lots of outdated info and inconclusive articles. Do you know if they conclusively found anything or if there is a good writeup on the whole situation?
I don't have such a source, but the Cybersecurity community throw accusations around easily, and are loathe to ever bless any software as completely innocent - which is a good thing.
When the accusations stop, the issue has either been addressed (typical outcome), or the product owner was written off by the Cybersecurity community as a lost cause (rare, but it happens).