That’s exactly the problem with many open source projects.
I recently experienced this first hand when submitting some pull requests to Jerboa and following the devs: As long as there is no money funding the project the devs are trying to support the project in their free time which means little to no time for quality control. Mistakes happen… most of them are uncritical but as long as there’s little to no time and expertise to audit code meaningfully and systematically, there will be bugs and these bugs may be critical and security relevant.
Even when you do have time. There have been “researchers” submitting malicious prs and when caught just act like it’s no big deal. Even had an entire institution banned from submitting prs to the Linux kernel.
Well, i think in most of those big incidents, people got caught. That means the concept kinda works well?
Regarding the earlier comment: I think companies just started to figure that out. They/You can’t just take free libraries databases etc… If you’re big tech company you better pay a few developers or an audit to make those libraries safe. This is your way of contributing. Otherwise your big platform will get hacked because you just took some 15 year olds open source code.
agree. Hell i wouldnt be shocked if some corporations or even nation-state (ie: NSA) actors do this, in a much better/more professional manner to ensure things like…backdoor access.
At least there have been attempts to subvert open standards for cryptography through the standards process. And occasional suspicious pull requests in critical places - I assume those are done through cut-out proxies so we don’t know who tried.
Like others have said. It’s a survivorship bias. So the meme has some weight. But it doesn’t make Foss any less secure than closed source. If anything it’s better to allow anyone to examine it. Similar to how secrets can’t be kept when large numbers of folks know, the same goes here I guess.
Yeah. I think the discussion is kind of nonsensical and a tautology. Nothing in life is 100% safe, if foss or not. And we don’t know what we don’t know.
We got a few cases where we know something got intercepted after people tried to do malicious PRs or intercepted network equipment.
I think the more interesting question has long been: what’s (or who is) your threat? Against a sufficiently motivated and resourced adversary, there are few real obstacles. Conversely, some people are just not interesting because there’s little or nothing to gain from attacking them.
For the human-hours of work that’s put into it it’s very expensive. I put in translations, highlighted bugs, put in a Jerboa fork to help mitigate issues with the 0.18 Lemmy upgrade… if I were to do this kind of thing for work I’d bill 25CAD per hour at the very minimum.
That’s exactly the problem with many open source projects.
I recently experienced this first hand when submitting some pull requests to Jerboa and following the devs: As long as there is no money funding the project the devs are trying to support the project in their free time which means little to no time for quality control. Mistakes happen… most of them are uncritical but as long as there’s little to no time and expertise to audit code meaningfully and systematically, there will be bugs and these bugs may be critical and security relevant.
Even when you do have time. There have been “researchers” submitting malicious prs and when caught just act like it’s no big deal. Even had an entire institution banned from submitting prs to the Linux kernel.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/linux-bans-university-of-minnesota-for-committing-malicious-code/
Well, i think in most of those big incidents, people got caught. That means the concept kinda works well?
Regarding the earlier comment: I think companies just started to figure that out. They/You can’t just take free libraries databases etc… If you’re big tech company you better pay a few developers or an audit to make those libraries safe. This is your way of contributing. Otherwise your big platform will get hacked because you just took some 15 year olds open source code.
Selection bias though. We don’t know how many have not yet been caught.
agree. Hell i wouldnt be shocked if some corporations or even nation-state (ie: NSA) actors do this, in a much better/more professional manner to ensure things like…backdoor access.
No hypothesis needed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EternalBlue can’t have been a one-off either.
Yeha that was my though. But more a dedicated program to do similar with large FOSS projects.
They also have hardware/supply chain intercept programs to install back doors in closed source appliances (ie: Cisco firewalls)
So something similar but dedicated to open source PRs.
At least there have been attempts to subvert open standards for cryptography through the standards process. And occasional suspicious pull requests in critical places - I assume those are done through cut-out proxies so we don’t know who tried.
We definately know of some. NSA tried to slip a faulty rng algo into rsa a while back
https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-the-nsa-may-have-put-a-backdoor-in-rsas-cryptography-a-technical-primer/
Like others have said. It’s a survivorship bias. So the meme has some weight. But it doesn’t make Foss any less secure than closed source. If anything it’s better to allow anyone to examine it. Similar to how secrets can’t be kept when large numbers of folks know, the same goes here I guess.
Yeah. I think the discussion is kind of nonsensical and a tautology. Nothing in life is 100% safe, if foss or not. And we don’t know what we don’t know. We got a few cases where we know something got intercepted after people tried to do malicious PRs or intercepted network equipment.
I think the more interesting question has long been: what’s (or who is) your threat? Against a sufficiently motivated and resourced adversary, there are few real obstacles. Conversely, some people are just not interesting because there’s little or nothing to gain from attacking them.
For the human-hours of work that’s put into it it’s very expensive. I put in translations, highlighted bugs, put in a Jerboa fork to help mitigate issues with the 0.18 Lemmy upgrade… if I were to do this kind of thing for work I’d bill 25CAD per hour at the very minimum.