<i>They distributed source and the patch is not at all obfuscated.</i><p>Which is exactly my point.<p>Say you are a government organization that requires a backdoor. You can make a very sophisticated backdoor. <i>When</i> it&#x27;s found it is clear that it is probably an intentional backdoor (e.g. Dual_EC_DRBG). Or you can make a very obvious backdoor that is disguised as a debugging option that you forgot to disable, an obvious logic error, etc. For such backdoors, it&#x27;s easy to argue that it was just sloppy programming (in contrast to an intentional government-requested backdoor), so people will assume the simpler explanation (as in Hanlan&#x27;s razor).<p>We have learned from the Debian OpenSSL saga [1] that trivial programming errors in critical software can go unnoticed for years. I don&#x27;t think the Debian OpenSSL bug was government-mandated, but it&#x27;s easy to see that this is a very attractive route: the bug caused only 32,768 unique private keys to be generated (great for spying), most people will believe it&#x27;s a true programming error, you pay the person&#x2F;company that introduces the bug royally for taking the blame.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;OpenSSL#Predictable_private_keys_.28Debian-specific.29" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;OpenSSL#Predictable_private_ke...</a>