Someone made the comment in this thread (I can't seem to find it
again) that a bug in MS security that counts as a hole, not a
backdoor. But a cooperative relationship between Microsoft and NSA
(or any vendor and their local signals security agency) can be more
subtle. What if Microsoft agreed not to fix that bug? What if
Microsoft gives NSA early access to source to look for bugs? The NSA
may not need much more than an agreement that certain portions of,
say, the RNG object code will never change (or only change
infrequently, with lots of notice). That might be enough to insure
that NSAs viruses and Trojan horses can always find the right spot to
insert a patch that weakens random number generation.
It may be time to question whether we should ever expect that mass
market operating systems from commercial vendors will protect users
against a targeted attack from a high resource operation such as the
major signals intelligence agencies. Users may have to rely on open
source OS's and security tools that are light weight, easy to audit
and isolated from the OS. Perhaps the best we can expect from a
commercial OS is enough protection to make it hard to scan data in
transit for users who super encrypt with stronger tools.
Arnold Reinhold
