Question about backdoors

[Mark H. Wood]

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On Mon, 9 Feb 2004 kgriffi at siue.edu wrote:
> I'm currently on break in a security class where someone has mentioned the
> backdoor NAI put in PGP.  Since Gnupg is open source can/does something like
> this exist?

I hope they are going to teach you all to ask better questions, somewhere
in that class.

Can a backdoor be put into GNUpg, or any open-source product?  Certainly.
Would its secrecy have a useful lifetime?  Almost certainly *not*.  Is
there, therefore, any point in trying?  Probably not enough to be worth
the effort.  How does this risk compare with that from some closed-source
product?  I will leave that as an exercise for the student. :-)

- -- 
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer   mwood at IUPUI.Edu
MS Windows *is* user-friendly, but only for certain values of "user".
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