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Frame from NSA operation ORCHESTRA Annual Status Report - FOSDEM 2014 Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

NSA operation ORCHESTRA Annual Status Report - FOSDEM 2014

cnxlinux
Talks
YouTube
2 HN users recommended this talk2 months2014–2021 score 2
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Recommended as an entertaining talk showing that targeting software projects and introducing bugs is nothing new.

Poul-Henning Kamp's FOSDEM 2014 talk presents a fictitious NSA program called ORCHESTRA, satirizing how intelligence agencies could influence startups and open source. It is a humorous but pointed look at surveillance and subverted software.

“It’s pretty entertaining and illustrates that this is nothing new.” (HN, 2021)

2 recommendations · 1 citations · Talks · partly dated

3 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@dobbsbob Apr 2014 Recommends
on HN thread Were Intelligence Agencies Using Heartbleed in November 2013?
Read more
I would say after watching this almost everybody could be a target of state interest from VCs to a janitor with a cellphone who works at a network they want into [this video] (FosDem2014 presention) and especially if you have any kind of trust in an open source community and your patches are accepted blindly. Personally if I were an evil intel agency I'd be going after GPU developers and manufacturers at all costs to get at their firmware sources or even possibly find ways to sabotage it at the source. It's the final frontier of awesome evilware potential. - the execution of GPU code, and transfer of data between device and host do not require admin privs so it will always run regardless of what the host system privilege settings are. - Malware w/Nvidia GPUs can be statically linked with the CUDA library in a standalone hidden file that never touches the operating system. - GPU memory is not shared with the CPU so encrypted malware can reside there undetected. - Run-time polymorphism: malware GPU code can be re-encrypted with a new random key thus mutate in completely random ways that would be difficult to detect even if you dumped the GPU memory on a regular basis. - GPU NSA code can easily access the screen framebuffer, and broadcast a live link of whatever somebody is doing. - GPU NSA code present the user with a nothing is wrong desktop pretending the virus scanner is still running, hiding daemons, presenting false browser screens hiding the fact SSL certs have been rejected,
FOSDEM talk on NSA targeting; shows anyone can be a target.
@wang_li Apr 2021 Recommends
on HN thread “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”
There’s no research going on here. Everyone knows buggy patches can get into a project. Submitting intentionally bad patches adds nothing beyond grandstanding. They could perform analysis of review/acceptance by looking at past patches that introduced bugs without being the bad actors that they apparently are. From FOSDEM 2014, NSA operation ORCHESTRA annual status report. It’s pretty entertaining and illustrates that this is nothing new. [link] [this video]
Entertaining FOSDEM talk showing malicious patch submission is nothing new.

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Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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