Circa 1975, IBM proposed the cipher now called DES, the Data Encryption Standard. It became a worldwide standard for secret key encryption. As IBM originally designed it, DES had a 64-bit key. The National Security Agency (NSA) required that the key be reduced from 64 bits to 56 bits, with the other 8 bits used as a checksum. This made no sense. If a checksum were really needed, then the key could be increased from 64 to 72 bits. It was widely believed that the real reason the NSA made this demand was that it knew how to crack messages using a 56-bit key, but not messages using a 64-bit key. This proved to be true.

Secret Key Cryptography by Frank Rubin

When was the last analysis of the linux kernel source code ?

Lol good year for the NSA

he wouldn’t be able to inject backdoors even if he wanted to, since the source code is open

Jia Tan has entered the chat

Ohh so it's the NSA that my failed sudos are reported to!

Years ago there was a commit to the Linux kernal that strangly had no author. This got some attention of several of the developers.

Looking into the code that had to deal with network transmission. there was a section that if you tried to get network access in a unusual way had a check that was written something like this.

If (usr_permission = ROOT) ... Instead of If (usr_permission == ROOT) ...

The first giving the user root if invoked and the second checking to see if the user was root.

It's widely thought this was the NSA or some other intelligence agency trying to backdoor lin Linux.

If you want t see Mr. Torvalds questioning this in the video in the link, go straight to minute 43.

good thing he's not an American citizen

As long as the backdoor is licenced GPL what's the problem?

This incident will be reported