True, but also, that is exactly the pretext that would allow someone to maliciously, intentionally commit a backdoor.
replyThere was even a contest for hiding/obfuscating malicious code, e.g. as an honest mistake: https://www.underhanded-c.org/ . And what do you know, the most recent, common approach shown on the page, is: improper comparison inputs that give unexpected comparison results, which is... well... this submission.
Yes, "this looks like an underhanded c challenge" was my first thought when reading this. See one mistake by one project, inject the matching intentional mistake into another project (that also conveniently fixes some known bug), and boom - plausibly deniable backdoor.
replyIf I had a free afternoon, I'd ask a bunch of agents to track the people responsible and their other contributions (but usually the scheme is "contribute valuable patches to build reputation, and only inject an exploit when safe to do so").
[flagged]
reply