Yup.
But in open source it CAN be noticed, by anyone determined enough to dig into its side effects.
Proprietary software? You file a regression bug that startup takes 500ms longer, and it might get looked at.

Also, backdoors that are discovered in open source software improve automated software auditing.

Wait, that references something that actually happened?

edit This?

https://www.runtime.news/how-a-500ms-delay-exposed-a-nightmare-scenario-for-the-software-supply-chain/

Thats not really how open source works. If you use an open source tool like say, nano. It has been looked at and improved for many years by many people who have worked up an understanding of the code.

I realize that this can only be natively understood by a programmer.

What we (I) do when we work at open source projects is reading through the code for so long until we "get it". It means we start to understand what does what. If you want so change something, you must locate it, finding out what it is not. The chance that someone stumbles across something that then sparks a full blown investigation isnt that low. Of course you can hide something in extremely long and boring code but its alas automatically tested by most software shops.

In short: we dont do this since yesterday and opeb source is so many universes better than closed source is a truth that only a fool would disregard.

I feel like its a mixed bag. Certainly there's an infinitely higher chance of someone randomly noticing a backdoor in OSS than in closed source simply because any OSS project in use has someone looking at it. Many closed systems have dusty corners that haven't had programmer eyes on them in years.

But also, modern dev requires either more vigilance than most of us have to give or more trust than most of us would ideally be comfortable offering. Forget leftpad, I've had npm dependencies run a full python script to compile and build sub dependencies. Every time I run npm update, it could be mining a couple of bitcoins for all I know in addition to installing gigs and gigs of other people's code.

The whole industry had deep talks after leftpadgate about what needed to be done and ultimately, not much changed. NPM changed policy so that people couldn't just dissapear their packages. But we didn't come up with some better way.

Pretty much every language has its own NPM now, the problem is more widespread than ever. With Rust, it can run arbitrary macros and rust code in the build files, it can embed C dependencies. I'm not saying it would be super easy to hide something in cargo, i haven't tried so I don't know, but i do think the build system is incredibly vulnerable to supply chain attacks. A dependency chain could easily pull in some backdoor native code, embed it deep into your app, and you might never realize it's even there.

I haven't really seen any evidence to support this

Reminds me of the old Debian OpenSSL vulnerability that went unnoticed for 2 years... but it did eventually get noticed.

https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2008/msg00152.html

For all we know...

This isn't something we need to speculate about. The vulnerability histories of popular closed and open source tools are both part of public data sets.

Looking into that data, the thing that stands out is that certain proprietary software vendors have terrible security track records, and open source tools from very small teams may be a mixed bag.

Evidence suggests this isn't the case.

We know of so many more closed source backdoors despite them being harder to notice in practice. Either before they became a problem or after they have been used in an attack. So we know backdoors can get noticed even without access to source code.

Meanwhile we have comparatively fewer backdoor type findings in major open source software, despite and thanks to increased scrutiny. So many people want to pad their resume with "findings" and go hit up open source software relentlessly. This can be obnoxious because many of the findings are flat out incorrect or have no actual security implications, but among the noise is a relatively higher likelihood that real issues get noticed.

The nature of the xz attack shows the increased complexity associated with attempting to back door open source. Sneaking a malicious binary patch into test data, because the source code would be too obvious, and having to hide asking the patch in an obfuscated way in build scripts that would only apply in theory under specific circumstances. Meanwhile the closed source backdoors have frequently been pretty straightforward but still managed to ship and not be detected.

Even if we failed to detect unused backdoors, at some point someone would actually want to use their backdoor, so they should be found at some point.

It always seems like it depends on really old libraries with major security flaws

The sad part is is that you're right.

And the reason that it's sad is that most of the individual veneers on proprietary projects deeply about a project itself and have the same goals as they do with open source software, which is just to make something that's useful and do cool shit.

Yep, the business itself can force them not take care of problems or force them to go in directions that are counter to their core motivations.

radical free speech

If that includes calling company money "free speech" (which the US does) I don't agree. I'm also not ok with holocaust denial and Naziism.

Is this still true in the age of targeted social media propaganda?

Seems to me that radical free speech without moderating for basic accuracy or malicious disinfo has pretty much kicked of the downfall of the American experiment

That’s what this meme is referencing. That was the XZ Utils backdoor. The contributor spent 5 years gaining the lead dev’s trust, waited for the lead dev to get busy with other things, then basically bullied the lead dev into handing over control of the project. They quietly pushed an SSH backdoor.

And then they were almost immediately called out by a dude who was running benchmarks and realized that his SSH requests were taking like 5ms longer than they should. That delay was because the backdoor was checking the SSH request against a table of backdoor requests, to see if it should allow the connection even if the UN/PW was wrong.

The big concern was that the SSH system was used all over the world. But rolling back to a previous version was easy, and most systems hadn’t updated yet anyways.

yeah this meme is referencing xz