Papas Fritas writes:
"Last October, Bruce Schneier speculated that the three characteristics of a good backdoor are a low chance of discovery, high deniability if discovered, and minimal conspiracy to implement. He now says that the critical iOS and OSX vulnerability that Apple patched last week meets these criteria, and could be an example of a deliberate change by a bad actor:
Look at the code. What caused the vulnerability is a single line of code: a second "goto fail;" statement. Since that statement isn't a conditional, it causes the whole procedure to terminate ... Was this done on purpose? I have no idea. But if I wanted to do something like this on purpose, this is exactly how I would do it.
He later added that 'if the Apple auditing system is any good, they will be able to trace this errant goto line to the specific login that made the change.'
Steve Bellovin, professor of Computer Science in Columbia University and Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission, has another take on the vulnerability: 'It may have been an accident; If it was enemy action, it was fairly clumsy.'"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by WildWombat on Sunday March 02 2014, @02:15AM
I don't have any clue whether or not that line was put there purposely or not but according to Jacob Appelbaum [youtube.com] in a talk he gave at 30c3 the NSA has been able to own any Apple machine they want for a long time now. I think it is probable that even if the NSA didn't plant that line there that they were aware of it.
--"But a three letter agency might have been able to disguise it a little better, don't you think? (Unless they were going for deniability rather than long-term endurance)."
Maybe, or maybe it was but the most obvious of many backdoors they have. Its impossible to know, since instead of protecting the American public like they're supposed to and fixing these types of flaws, they hoard them in order to use them and leave all of us vulnerable.
Cheers,
-WW