Tag: FreeBSD

OpenBSD IPSec backdoor allegations: triple $100 bounty

In case you hadn’t heard: Gregory Perry alleges that the FBI paid OpenBSD contributors to insert backdoors into OpenBSD’s IPSec stack, with his (Perry’s) knowledge and collaboration.

If that were true, it would also be a concern for FreeBSD, since some of our IPSec code comes from OpenBSD.

I’m having a hard time swallowing this story, though. In fact, I think it’s preposterous. Rather than go into further detail, I’ll refer you to Jason Dixon’s summary, which links to other opinions, and add only one additional objection: if this were true, there would be no “recently expired NDA”; it would be a matter of national security.

I’ll put my money where my mouth is, and post a triple bounty: Continue reading “OpenBSD IPSec backdoor allegations: triple $100 bounty”

Off by one

I made a small modification to phybs to verify the function of jumpers 7-8 on the WD Advanced Format drives (see here and here). It is supposed to cause the disk to internally shift every write by one sector, so that a write to sector 63 (where the first partition on a PC normally starts) actually goes to sector 64, which coincides with the beginning of a physical 4,096-byte sector. These numbers confirm this:

   count    size  offset    step        msec     tps    kBps
   32768    4096       0   16384       78631      34    1666
   32768    4096     512   16384       79880      33    1640
   32768    4096    1024   16384       73164      36    1791
   32768    4096    1536   16384       77727      34    1686
   32768    4096    2048   16384       76975      35    1702
   32768    4096    2560   16384       74970      36    1748
   32768    4096    3072   16384       79379      34    1651
   32768    4096    3584   16384       28094      96    4665

The firmware on the disk shifts everything forward by 512 bytes, so all these passes are unaligned except the last one, because 3,584 + 512 = 4,096.