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SquirrelMail 1.4.13 released - older versions compromised

SquirrelMail 1.4.13 released - older versions compromised

Posted Dec 18, 2007 2:59 UTC (Tue) by tetromino (subscriber, #33846)
In reply to: SquirrelMail 1.4.13 released - older versions compromised by wahern
Parent article: SquirrelMail 1.4.13 released - older versions compromised

> The constraint that it must  "look reasonable to a casual human inspector" doesn't make
sense.

The constraint makes sense in the specific context of a php script. Too many times, I have
been bitten by an update to a webapp that broke my customized setup. Therefore, whenever I
install an update for a webapp, I look at the diff. Now, I am not a php expert and I don't
analyze it in detail, so it's quite likely that I will miss a subtle backdoor. However, if I
see 100000 lines of garbage that were introduced just to make the md5 sums coincide, I will
become extremely suspicious. I am sure thousands of other people who perform due diligence
when installing updates will notice the same thing.


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