An open Snort

I thought that yesterday's post would create more of a stir.

Zone Alarm -- a free, popular internet firewall used by millions, perhaps even by you -- is made by a Israeli company called Check Point, now under investigation by the State Department. Check Point wants to buy another computer security firm, Sourcefire, which is heavily involved with military systems. The worry is that a "back door" will place our security secrets in Israeli hands. The Sourcefire controversy, in turn, led me to wonder if someone could have put a similar back door into Zone Alarm.

Now, you'd think a story like that would press all sorts of paranoia buttons. But those buttons went un-pressed.

For those of you saying "But Israel is our ally!", recall that Jonathan Pollard's data was relayed by Israel to the Soviets, in exchange for easing the exit path for many Russian Jews. As Xymphora reminds us, Israel has also passed American military tech secrets to China.

All foreign nations have agendas which differ from ours.

Sourcefire produces an intrusion prevention application called Snort, which sees some usage in military systems. This may seem worrisome at first -- what if Mossad reconfigures Snort to learn all our secrets? -- but, as one of Xymphora's readers reminds us, Snort is open source.

Does that mean we can trust it without question? I'll leave that question for the specialists to answer. Personally, I find it hard to imagine how anyone could place a back door into code open to examination and modification. (But what do I know? The last time I tried my hand at non-HTML programming was when I put together a small BASIC routine in 1984.)

I'm reminded of a similar controversy which has arisen over Tor, a program which allows users to use the internet anonymously. (See here, scroll down to number 9.) Tor was developed by the Navy, which has used it for intelligence gathering purposes.

That history set off all sorts of alarm bells: What if the intelligence community made this thing available to the world, placed a back door into it, and thus had a bird's-eye view of everyone who was trying to escape cyber-scrutiny? (Dan Bown's entertaining Digital Fortress is based on a very similar scenario.)

By way of illustration: Banks use the postal service, not armored cars, to ship worn-out folding money. Armored cars simply tell the bad guys where the money is. Similarly, anyone using Tor or another proxy service is shouting to the world that he has something to hide. Instead of trying to spy on all the net, our intelligence professionals would no doubt prefer to narrow their scrutiny to the users of proxies.

But Tor, too, is open source. And that means we can trust it. Just as we can trust Snort.

Even so...I wonder...