this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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From the article...
Is auditing for security reasons ever done on any open source code? Is everyone just assuming that everyone else is doing it, and hence no one is really doing it?
EDIT: I'm not attacking open source, I'm a big believer in open source.
I'm just trying to start a conversation about a potential flaw that needs to be addressed.
Once the conversation was started I was going to expand the conversation by suggesting an open source project that does security audits on other open source projects.
Please put the pitchforks away.
You're making a logical fallacy called affirming the consequent where you're assuming that just because the backdoor was caught under these particular conditions, these are the only conditions under which it would've been caught.
Suppose the bad actor had not been sloppy; it would still be entirely possible that the backdoor gets identified and fixed during a security audit performed by an enterprise grade Linux distribution.
In this case it was caught especially early because the bad actor did not cover their tracks very well, but now that that has occurred, it cannot necessarily be proven one way or the other whether the backdoor would have been caught by other means.
Have those audits you allude to ever caught anything before it went live? Cuz this backdoor has been around for a month and RedHat is affected, too. Plus this was the single owner of a package who is implicitly trusted, it's not like it was a random contributor whose PRs would get reviewed.
The code being open source helps people track it down once they try to debug an issue (performance issue and crashes because in their setup the memory layout was not what the backdoor was expecting), that's true. But what actually triggered the investigation was the bug. After that it's just a matter of time to trace it back to the backdoor. You understimate reverse engineers. Or maybe I'm just spoiled.
How long until US bans code from developers with ties to CN/RU?
That won't happen because it would effectively mean banning all FOS which isn't remotely practical.
How do you propose we meaningfully fix this issue? Hoping random people catch stuff doesn't count.
An open source project that does nothing but security audits on other open source projects?
In time it may become a trade-off between new (with associated features and speed) Vs tried and tested/secure.
To us now this sounds perverse, but remember that NASA generally use very old hardware because they can be more certain the various bugs & features have been found and documented. In NASA's case this is for reliability. I'll concede 'brute force' does add another dimension when applying this logic to security.
This may also become an AI arms race. Finding exploits is likely something AI could become very good at - but a better AI seeking to obfuscate?