Linux Can Be Hacked —

— big time! But we knew that, right?

Dan O’Dowd, CEO of Green Hills Software, which makes embedded operating systems, has written a white paper that describes how nefarious hackers could insert hostile code into the Linux operating system itself — code that might have security vulnerabilities that nobody can anticipate or imagine.

O’Dowd is arguing that the Linux open development model is very dangerous because there is fundamentally no quality control, no vetting, no background checks of the developers. What he doesn’t say, alas, is that closed source developers really do no better.

Computerworld wrote a fairly non-critical article about the white paper.