Re: Linuxfromscratch.org

[Colin Walters <walters@verbum.org>]

On Wed, 2003-07-23 at 15:34, karlm@mit.edu wrote:

> I believe Dean is mistaken and is actually referring to Ken Thompson's
> theoretical attack.  The point is you can't see if the backdoor
> exists.  Unless you have personally recreated the history of modern
> computing from first priciples in your basement or place of work, you
> may be 0wn3d and not know it, in theory.

The thing is though that to do any kind of "useful" damage (e.g. send
passwords back to the author), at some point the trojan is going to have
to connect to the network.  And if it does that, chances are some
careful network administrator somewhere is going to notice some strange
connections, eventually.  I mean, when your file server starts making
HTTP POST requests or whatever, you'd get very suspicious. 

It seems much harder to believe this trojan would have been able to
compromise all the network traffic sniffers out there.


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