cnxlinux
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2014–2021
46:06 · 6.6K views · Feb 13, 2014
Poul-Henning Kamp's FOSDEM 2014 talk presents a fictitious NSA program called ORCHESTRA, satirizing how intelligence agencies could influence startups and open source. It is a humorous but pointed look at surveillance and subverted software.
Recommended as an entertaining talk showing that targeting software projects and introducing bugs is nothing new.
3 comments from Hacker News
I would say after watching this almost everybody could be a target of state interest from VCs to a janitor with a cellphone who works at a network they want into this video (FosDem2014 presention) and especially if you have any kind of trust in an open source community and your patches are accepted blindly. Personally if I were an evil intel agency I'd be going after GPU developers and manufacturers at all costs to get at their firmware sources or even possibly find ways to sabotage it at the source. It's the final frontier of awesome evilware potential. - the execution of GPU code, and transfer of data between device and host do not require admin privs so it will always run regardless of what the host system privilege settings are. - Malware w/Nvidia GPUs can be statically linked with the CUDA library in a standalone hidden file that never touches the operating system. - GPU memory is not shared with the CPU so encrypted malware can reside there undetected. - Run-time polymorphism: malware GPU code can be re-encrypted with a new random key thus mutate in completely random ways that would be difficult to detect even if you dumped the GPU memory on a regular basis. - GPU NSA code can easily access the screen framebuffer, and broadcast a live link of whatever somebody is doing. - GPU NSA code present the user with a nothing is wrong desktop pretending the virus scanner is still running, hiding daemons, presenting false browser screens hiding the fact SSL certs have been rejected,
There’s no research going on here. Everyone knows buggy patches can get into a project. Submitting intentionally bad patches adds nothing beyond grandstanding. They could perform analysis of review/acceptance by looking at past patches that introduced bugs without being the bad actors that they apparently are. From FOSDEM 2014, NSA operation ORCHESTRA annual status report. It’s pretty entertaining and illustrates that this is nothing new. [LINK] this video
this video I'm not saying that this thread or even HN is a victim of this. I do want to use this opportunity to contribute that there are NSA programs designed to derail conversations.