[CentOS] OT: systemd Poll - So Long, and Thanks for All the fish.

Pete Biggs pete at biggs.org.uk
Sat Apr 15 08:46:13 UTC 2017


Not wishing to extend this thread further, but ...

> There are conspiracy theories out there that the NSA is involved with 
> bringing systemd to Linux so they can have easy access to *"unknown"* 
> bugs - aka backdoors - to all Linux installations using systemd *[1]*. 

They're conspiracy theories, and that's it. The bottom line is that in
general people don't like not understanding things and when they come
across something they don't understand they create a mythology around
those things to rationalise their non-understanding. Factor in to that
the general mindset of Linux hackers/admins that they must know and
understand every part of their system and you create the perfect
environment for such theories to grow and blossom.

Systemd is complex; it's implementation was badly handled on a social
level. Nevertheless it is open source. It is highly unlikely that the
NSA, or any other agency, would risk putting in backdoors to code that
could be audited by Joe "random hacker" Blogs, let alone that might be
discovered by hostile agencies.

There is no doubt that most security agencies have a long list of zero-
day exploits in their toolbox - I would hazard to suggest that they
wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't! But I seriously doubt they
would commission exploitable code in something that is openly
auditable.

P.





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