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The Linux backdoor attempt of 2003 (2013)

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Re: The Linux backdoor attempt of 2003 (2013)

#71

Post by dspearson »

hulitu wrote: post #63
grugq wrote: post #3

I have the full story on that incident. It is actually really funny. If the guy who did it wants to come forward, that is his decision. [edit: I won't name names.] He did provided me the full story. He told me with the understanding that the story would go public, so I will dig it up and post it. I also interviewed the sysadmins who were running the box at the time. 1. it was not an NSA operation, it was done by a ha…

> 1. it was not an NSA operation, it was done by a hacker. Just like the NPR is not financed by the US government, but by NGOs.

Next we'll be hearing that ~el8 was a CIA front. :)

Re: The Linux backdoor attempt of 2003 (2013)

#73

Post by School-Cotton »

grugq wrote: post #28
ajross wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear: you're telling us the full story of the discovery, not the full story of the exploit? You and your source don't know who the attacker was, right?

What is there to say about the hack? Like everything back then it was probably accomplished by exploiting trust relationships. I can ask him, but it is not at interesting 20 years later.

The part of your story that’s still unclear is whether you know the identify of who actually inserted the malicious code.

Re: The Linux backdoor attempt of 2003 (2013)

#74

Post by dspearson »

spenczar5 wrote: post #40
grugq wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is there to say about the hack? Like everything back then it was probably accomplished by exploiting trust relationships. I can ask him, but it is not at interesting 20 years later.

It is very interesting to prove whether or not it was a state actor! Surely you can see that that mystery is interesting to many people.

It was not a state actor. There were plenty of high profile people and projects being owned just for the fun of it back then.

Re: The Linux backdoor attempt of 2003 (2013)

#75

Post by School-Cotton »

a-dub wrote: post #51

it still seems kinda weird to me that all it takes to elevate privileges for a user process to "can arbitrarily write system level memory or disk" is just the clearing of all the bits of a single integer in kernel space which can be done by pretty much any execution path in the kernel. it just seems like there could be a more tamper resistant mechanism around privilege elevations.

Yeah, everything in the kernel is trusted and lives in one address space, just like any normal program. This is part of what would be solved by a microkernel architecture.

Re: The Linux backdoor attempt of 2003 (2013)

#76

Post by School-Cotton »

akira2501 wrote: post #69
layer8 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that is well known, but it doesn’t prevent the issue in TFA.

How does it not? Applied literally to the article, it would have turned this backdoor into a compile time error.

Because you can’t trust the person backdooring your code to help you out by writing in this style.

Re: The Linux backdoor attempt of 2003 (2013)

#77

Post by marssaxman »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #18
ijustlovemath wrote: post #10

Another bit of cleverness not mentioned in the article is that assignment expressions always evaluate to the rvalue. So the expression `current->uid = 0` has the effect of making sure that entire conditional never actually runs (or at least, the return never runs), which means the overall behavior of wait4 doesn't change in an observable way. Very clever if you're trying to pass all of the existing tests

Ohh, that is clever - unless someone writes a test for these two new lines, and finds that they never return -EINVAL.

Did unit tests exist in 2003? I don't clearly remember when that idea came along, but comprehensive unit testing certainly was not standard practice 20 years ago... not in any organization I knew about at the time, anyway!

Re: The Linux backdoor attempt of 2003 (2013)

#78

Post by gerdesj »

aftbit wrote: post #12

While I'm here, does anyone know of a good trustworthy RAT for Windows machines that I can control from my Linux box? I have some relatives for whom I provide technical support. I'd love to just put an EXE on their desktop that would launch a VNC session and connect back to me (since they have the typical NAT + firewall of home users), but I don't want to install a virus on their machines.

OpenVPN, IPSEC, Wireguard can all be used to tether them to you. If you don't have a static IP then a dynamic DNS service can fix that. Once you have a VPN then use whatever you fancy - RDP for example.

You could use Teamviewer or the like.

Self host a MeshCentral or RustDesk (MC for me!)

Re: The Linux backdoor attempt of 2003 (2013)

#79

Post by epcoa »

grugq wrote: post #3

I have the full story on that incident. It is actually really funny. If the guy who did it wants to come forward, that is his decision. [edit: I won't name names.] He did provided me the full story. He told me with the understanding that the story would go public, so I will dig it up and post it. I also interviewed the sysadmins who were running the box at the time. 1. it was not an NSA operation, it was done by a ha…

Geez, this crowd. The clearest evidence that it was not an NSA attack is that it was not very good. It modified a CVS mirror. At no time was the source of truth (the bitkeeper repo) in any danger. Anybody that knew how this stuff worked at the time would have known it would be caught immediately. Not very state level expertise, pretty sad if it was the NSA.

Re: The Linux backdoor attempt of 2003 (2013)

#80

Post by akira2501 »

School-Cotton wrote: post #76
akira2501 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it not? Applied literally to the article, it would have turned this backdoor into a compile time error.

Because you can’t trust the person backdooring your code to help you out by writing in this style.

Yes, they could literally violate the coding style, but presumably, that would draw more attention to what they've done, not less.
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