[Info-vax] Have the NSA planted backdoors in VMS ?

[onewingedshark at gmail.com]

On Monday, January 8, 2018 at 3:14:45 PM UTC-7, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> 
> Once again, I remind people to read Ken Thompson's "Reflections
> on Trusting Trust".   Written and delivered in 1983.  Talks of
> a hidden backdoor in Unix from long before that.  Tell me again
> how you think it unlikely something like a backdoor could be
> put into VMS.

Actually, this is one spot Ada explicitly addresses in its standards -- Annex H (High Integrity Systems) provides the "Reviewable" [H.3.1] and "Inspection_Point" [H.3.2] pramas/aspects -- see: http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/rm12_w_tc1/html/RM-H.html (Use the ">> Next" button to navigate to the next subsection.)

> 
> > 
> > BTW, let's assume that this was an accident and not a deliberate
> > backdoor. That means the next question is: did the NSA find out
> > about this during their normal evaluation of systems and then
> > decide not to tell DEC about it ?
> > 
> 
> I think people here give the NSA more credit than they deserve.
> They are dangerous, but they are not gods.
> 
> bill