Theo de Raadt: The Man Who Built the Internet's Locks

Theo de Raadt built OpenSSH and OpenBSD for a world he didn't trust. It cost him NetBSD, a DARPA grant and many friends. The world moved in anyway.

I. Half a Second

Until the last days of March 2024, almost nobody outside a small circle of programmers had heard of liblzma. It was a compression library, a piece of plumbing buried deep in Linux, and for two years someone had been preparing to use it to walk through the front door of the internet.

He called himself Jia Tan. He was patient. He wrote helpful patches and was polite to an exhausted volunteer maintainer, and in time he was given the keys. Then he began to build. The payload went into the release tarballs in pieces, disguised as test files. It was aimed at OpenSSH, the program that guards remote access to nearly every server on Earth.

It nearly worked....

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