CYBERPUNK: A Little NSA In Your Computer?

So, why is the National Security Agency taking such an interest in Linux?

That was the unspoken question in the air March 14 at the monthly meeting of the Maryland Columbia Area Linux Users Group (CALUG). That night, in a second-floor room in an otherwise empty office building, NSA rep Peter Loscocco, wearing jeans and a faded red shirt, and the likewise casually attired Steven Smalley, of NSA contractor http://www.pgp.com/research/nailabs/default.asp>NAI Labs, explained how the federal agency had modified a version of Linux to make it truly "secure."

But will normally open-minded Linux devotees accept code from America's premier spy agency?

This meeting was set up by CALUG coordinator Randy Schrickel, who does some consulting for NSA himself and already knew a bit about Security-Enhanced Linux, as the modified-by-NSA version is called. Since NSA's headquarters at Fort Meade is near Columbia, Schrickel called the agency to ask if someone would be willing to come to the group's meeting to talk about it.

Loscocco and Smalley agreed to stop by, and their talk was a treat. Both worked on SELinux, and what they described that night seems to be, even as a prototype, some serious stuff. SELinux goes way beyond the "firewalls," or virtual barriers, that keep intruders out of today's networked computers. As system administrators know all too well, firewalls don't entirely fireproof computers. Crackers sniff out passwords or sneak in open ports, viruses come through e-mail, damaging codes are dumped through Web-page forms, Trojan Horse-style. And once someone gains "root access" to a machine, they own it. In contrast, SELinux, through the use of something called mandatory access control, checks every process the computer undertakes against a customizable matrix of allowable actions. It's security management for control freaks.

That NSA concerns itself with Linux at all might seem surprising at first blush. After all, the operating system and the federal agency occupy opposing ideological poles. Linux is all about openness: Only because its code is publicly available for programmers worldwide to improve upon can it grow and prosper. This belief is the basis of the near fervent "open source" software movement, which has little use for corporate walls or national borders. In contrast, the NSA is all about secrecy: Only by maintaining a cloak of absolute anonymity can it carry out its chief mission of monitoring foreign communications for information of interest to the feds.

So, it's not often that the secrecy-minded NSA goes out on speaking engagements, much less offers help to renegade software movements. One tech writer, Larry Loeb, wrote on IBM's DeveloperWorks site that NSA introducing SELinux to the world is the "equivalent of the Pope coming down off the balcony in Rome, working the crowd with a few loaves of bread and some fishes, and then inviting everyone to come over to his place to watch the soccer game and have a few beers."

Of course, the conspiracy-minded could find motives quite easily. And inevitably, someone in the back row of the CALUG asked the question that, however embarrassing it may have been to do so, nonetheless had to be asked: Is there some sort of back door written into SELinux? Meaning, did the NSA plant secret access points that it can use to gain entry into people's computers?

It is a good question. After all, just last week it was reported that Germany is banning Microsoft software from its sensitive posts, fearing that the NSA had already planted back doors in that company's products ("German armed forces ban MS software, citing NSA snooping," The Register). Although German officials later denied the reports, a similar concern was also voiced last September when an ex-NSA analyst accused the agency of persuading some commercial software companies to add booby-hatches to their products ("Ex-NSA expert warns of concealed backdoors," ZD Net ). And a few years ago, when the government was hammering out a standard for creating electronic signatures, the NSA okayed a proposed digital signature but didn't identify a serious flaw that would allow a sophisticated party -- such as, say, the NSA -- to install a trapdoor (and NSA denies this was the case ). Lastly, let's not forget the supposed "NSAkey" that got Microsoft- and NSA-haters all in an indignant huff ("Security Expert Says Microsoft Placed NSA Backdoor In Windows," HackWatch).