On Thu, 2009-10-22 at 23:43 +0100, David King wrote: > Although I have no hard evidence, it was years ago that I heard about > the US govt/FBI having a backdoor into Windows, and that all antivirus > software by law cannot be allowed to detect what the FBI, etc., put onto > people's computers. >
This reminds me of a story I heard a few years ago, quoting from http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/b/backdoor.html "Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM admitted the existence of a back door in early Unix versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly clever security hack of all time. In this scheme, the C compiler contained code that would recognize when the `login' command was being recompiled and insert some code recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system whether or not an account had been created for him. Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler, you have to *use* the compiler -- so Thompson also arranged that the compiler would *recognize when it was compiling a version of itself*, and insert into the recompiled compiler the code to insert into the recompiled `login' the code to allow Thompson entry -- and, of course, the code to recognize itself and do the whole thing again the next time around! And having done this once, he was then able to recompile the compiler from the original sources; the hack perpetuated itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and active but with no trace in the sources." This was from a time when source code was supplied with proprietary software. > It might be true, it might be partially true. But the fact is that, > AFAIK, this kind of spyware can exist on Windows PCs, but not so much in > Linux. Have you checked all the source code for your operating system? :-) Dan -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
