On Wed, 14 Apr 2004 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Tzafrir Cohen wrote:
> > There are other parts of hardware. For instance: assume that the disc
> > controller has some idle time. Make it search for a pattern of the login
> > binary of a certain distro and change it a bit.
> >
> > Filesystem reading code is not very large: try grub.
> >
> > Some disk controllers can be updated by firmware. Another possible
> > place is a remote storage device.
> >
>
> The original speaker was trying to bash Linux/FOSS by saying that
> you can't trust the code put into it.
Because the source code was not published. Hard to believe that BSD was
based on the same code and no one saw this. I don't think that there is
any chance of this happening in any part of Linux or FreeBSD.
I suspect that the story is based on a short-lived Unix version, and that
when Ken Thompson "admitted" this after fourteen years, the affected code
was probably not in use for 13 years except on some legacy PDP 10 machines
at Bell labs.
- yba
>
> The possibility to change disk controller's firmware (or a CPU
> microcode) wouldn't be a point against FOSS - you can do the same
> to crack into a closed-source system.
>
> --Amos
>
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