Patrick Wardle is known for being a Mac malware specialist, but his coding work has traveled far and wide without his permission.
A former employee of the NSA and NASA, he is also the founder of the Objective-See Foundation: a nonprofit that creates open-source security tools for macOS. The latter role means that a lot of Wardle’s software code is now freely available to download and decompile — and some of this code has apparently caught the eye of technology companies that are using it without his permission.
Wardle will lay out his case in a presentation on Thursday at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference with Tom McGuire, a cybersecurity researcher at Johns Hopkins University. The researchers found that code written by Wardle and released as open source has made its way into a number of commercial products over the years — all without the users crediting him or licensing and paying for the work.
The problem, Wardle says, is that it’s difficult to prove that the code was stolen rather than implemented in a similar way by coincidence. Fortunately, because of Wardle’s skill in reverse-engineering software, he was able to make more progress than most.
“I was only able to figure [the code theft] out because I both write tools and reverse engineer software, which is not super common,” Wardle told The Verge in a call before the talk. “Because I straddle both of these disciplines I could find it happening to my tools, but other indie developers might not be able to, which is the concern.”
MacDailyNews Take: A far too common occurrence.
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