[geekcrypt] Re: Back door competition

  • From: Niklas Lemcke - 林樂寬 <compul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: geekcrypt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2014 14:57:59 +0800

Well, if you insert as part of the competition, hoping to "win" e.g.
for it not to be discovered, and immediately write an encrypted
message telling about the backdoor; and if the others are actively
searching (which is supposed to be promoted through this) and want to
see the decrypted message at the end of the two weeks, then I don't
think we will 'forget' one.

It would be easy to go through each 'encrypted message' and double
check if all backdoors are gone before each release.

Of course we need to be cautios. But I think it can help to promote
awareness in the team.


On Fri, 6 Jun 2014 07:46:03 +0100
Pid Zero <p1dz3r0@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I'm a little dubious about actively trying to weaken the code for fun. What
> if we forget a backdoor? I'm just as concerned about initial TLA
> involvement, but other than have every other dev check each other's work or
> write the same code in parallel I can't see how you'd get around it.
> Decentralising so that as few devs as possible have access to accept
> commits and sign the binaries (I.e. Segregation of duties & least
> privilege) are good practices to adopt to mitigate any mole impact.
> 
> In either event rebuilding trust is going to be difficult within the
> established community without the potential for the scandal that would
> arise if one of us were found to have knowingly inserted a backdoor which
> we forgot about and was later exploited by a TLA like the NSA!
> 
> On Friday, June 6, 2014, Bill Cox <waywardgeek@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, Jun 6, 2014 at 12:46 AM, Niklas Lemcke - 林樂寬 <
> > compul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','compul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx');>> wrote:
> >
> >> I am completely in love with that "thought" of yours! It'll keep
> >> everybody on the run, while also offering good learning opportunities
> >> for the rookies / non-core developers.
> >>
> >> Let's do it. Maybe once every week would be a little short. Maybe every
> >> two weeks?
> >>
> >> What do the others think?
> >>
> >> Niklas
> >>
> >
> > Two weeks works for me.  Also, it would be fun to track how many back
> > doors we each find.  We could begin to get a sense for who is good at
> > creating back doors, and who is good at finding them.  I'm guessing they
> > will be different people :-)  This might also provide a useful metric for
> > developer performance.  The #1 value a core developer brings to the team,
> > IMO, is trust in the code, and this could help us understand who is most
> > able to create that trust.  That could help a lot when it's time to promote
> > a developer to core-developer.
> >
> > Bill
> >



-- 
Niklas Lemcke - 林樂寬

At the time of writing, no warrants have ever been served to me, Niklas
Lemcke, nor am I under any personal legal compulsion concerning the
CipherShed project. I do not know of any searches or seizures of my
assets.

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