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this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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I really can't believe they've stopped. Their mentality is "national security has no morals". They'll do everything they can do to facilitate that mission, though not getting caught is a big part of the facade they need to put on to keep or renovate their image to do this.
Maybe they're being more careful, and doing simple things like putting in timestamps that emulate working hours in other timezones are certainly the first thing they're going to think about. That one has always cracked me up, security researchers point to it like it's proof of something, which is ridiculous. Just like our people are smart, I don't think the foreign actors are dumb either.
And before you say it, I'd be all over not being paranoid if it hadn't been proven to me time and again that these agencies won't change, that they don't give a shit about what's right if it gets in the way of their mandate. The only thing that might change is how well they hide things now and intimidate their people into staying quiet. Because potential whistleblowers have seen the examples that have been made.
Personally I suspect they're getting all the information they care about via subpoenas on big data and social media companies. They don't have a need to compromise security on a technical level anymore because the justice system itself is compromised. That means backdoors only benefit national enemies at this point, so the NSA of today would rather those not exist at all.
Of course that's not to say anyone should trust those agencies at their word on anything.
Backdoors at a mation-state level are a double edged sword. In order to successfully implement a backdoor, you need to ensure that you are more clever than your adversaries, because those same backdoors can be used against you. You must assume that they will eventually discover them, and be able to leverage them against you. Then you must be able to identify that it had been compromised, and then "responsibly disclose" the vulnerability before too much damage is done.
Much better to be on the defensive. Discover 0days first, either accidental or intentional, and then use them until someone else discloses them and they get patched to hell.
In this instance, that's not the case. Only those in possession of the right key can use the backdoor. Also, discovering infected systems from the outside, appears to be impossible - the backdoor simply does not do anything to reveal itself if you don't have the key.
I must be mistaken then. I suppose keys have never, ever been compromised. Nobody has ever taken sensitive information without authorization, either. Especially not from the NSA!
You were talking about adversaries discovering the backdoor. That's something entirely different from compromised keys. So your sacrasm is quite misplaced here.
Columbus "discovered" America.