Editing 1755: Old Days
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In the title text, Hairbun continues her musings on the old compiler days, stating that there was ''a lot of drama in those days''. Specifically she references ''[http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html Reflections on Trusting Trust]'' a famous 1984 paper by {{w|UNIX}} co-creator {{w|Ken Thompson}} in which he described a way to hide a virtually undetectable backdoor in the UNIX login code via a second backdoor in the C compiler. Using the technique in his paper, it would be impossible to discover the hacked login by examining the official source code for either the login or the compiler itself. Ken Thompson may have actually included this backdoor in early versions of UNIX, undiscovered. Ken Thompson's paper demonstrated that it was functionally impossible to prove that any piece of software was fully trustworthy. | In the title text, Hairbun continues her musings on the old compiler days, stating that there was ''a lot of drama in those days''. Specifically she references ''[http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html Reflections on Trusting Trust]'' a famous 1984 paper by {{w|UNIX}} co-creator {{w|Ken Thompson}} in which he described a way to hide a virtually undetectable backdoor in the UNIX login code via a second backdoor in the C compiler. Using the technique in his paper, it would be impossible to discover the hacked login by examining the official source code for either the login or the compiler itself. Ken Thompson may have actually included this backdoor in early versions of UNIX, undiscovered. Ken Thompson's paper demonstrated that it was functionally impossible to prove that any piece of software was fully trustworthy. | ||
β | Hairbun claims that one of the dramas she refers to was that people tried to force Ken Thompson to retire, so everyone could stop being so paranoid about compilers. In reality, any coder who created the first version of a compiler (or a similar critical component) could inject a similar backdoor into software, so it would be false safety. Even if no one else had thought of this, then Thompson's paper was there for any future hacker to see. Though the problem was (claimed to be) solved in {{w|David A. Wheeler}} | + | Hairbun claims that one of the dramas she refers to was that people tried to force Ken Thompson to retire, so everyone could stop being so paranoid about compilers. In reality, any coder who created the first version of a compiler (or a similar critical component) could inject a similar backdoor into software, so it would be false safety. Even if no one else had thought of this, then Thompson's paper was there for any future hacker to see. Though the problem was (claimed to be) solved in {{w|David A. Wheeler}} Ph.D dissertation "[http://dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/ Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC)]". |
==Table of statements== | ==Table of statements== |