Re: Is Open Source software really more secure?
On Sun, Oct 08, 2000 at 02:34:16PM -0700, Paul Lowe wrote:
> When was the last time someone looked over the entire code base of mySQL to
> make sure it didn't have a trojan inside? I mean hey, theoretically, who
> goes over source code? Reading other programmer's source is both painful and
> difficult. It would not be hard for someone to release a oss package,
> announce it on freshmeat, have it distributed to thousands of people -- and
> have malicious code inside it. I mean, hey, do you always read the Makefile
> to make sure it doesn't contain a line that says "rm -rf /" for "make
> install"?
When? Probably in the last month or so.
People actually do audit these things. Not before they get posted to
freshmeat, but I'm dubious about things from random sites anyway...
it's a survival trait. Packaged programs in distributions are
generally fairly well looked-over and tested.
Dan
/--------------------------------\ /--------------------------------\
| Daniel Jacobowitz |__| SCS Class of 2002 |
| Debian GNU/Linux Developer __ Carnegie Mellon University |
| dan@debian.org | | dmj+@andrew.cmu.edu |
\--------------------------------/ \--------------------------------/
Reply to: