

OsTestBackdoorATI symbol found in AMD-catalyst 13.12 - galapago
http://pastebin.com/mc3Xg694

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jdoenone
The dump is incomplete. It is a switch case and the cases do not appear in the
dump... The debugging function called only return 0. This is obviously some
debug to trap memory corruption for objects shared with the device hardware.

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ambiate
I also have 'backdoor' symbols in my proprietary code. It is a means to bypass
certain functionality in a test environment. The test symbols do not get
excluded in the production build due to laziness.

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65a
If you care enough to look, you should be using open source, not binary blobs.
The current state of graphics on Linux are nothing less than a travesty to the
Open Source movement, as many new users are pushed to the blobs.

The ATI open source drivers are pretty good, the NVidia's were not so good
last I checked, and everything else is a crapshoot for even correct
modesetting.

~~~
this_user
> _" The ATI open source drivers are pretty good"_

For 2D yes, but for newer models OpenGL is incompletely implemented and the
performance is worse than on an integrated Intel chipset. Unfortunately, AMD's
Catalyst blob is oftentimes buggy, or doesn't support the latest X.org and is
generally a nightmare to configure when not using a completely standard setup.
Nvidia's blob at least works mostly flawless while the open source Nouveau
driver is far behind in terms of completeness and performance.

All in all, there is no way around the proprietary drivers at the moment if
you want to use the full capabilities of your hardware under Linux. That has
been the situation for years and it seems unlikely to change anytime soon.

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kcbanner
People need to calm down. There is no reason to believe this is malicious.

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jliptzin
If this were indeed malicious, I doubt they'd be dumb enough to give the
symbol a name with backdoor in it.

But maybe they're doing some clever reverse psychology

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galapago
Source:
[https://twitter.com/hashcat/status/422665130002747392](https://twitter.com/hashcat/status/422665130002747392)

