Talk:1755: Old Days

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 04:52, 4 November 2016 by 108.162.221.168 (talk) (Reflections on Trusting Trust: new section)
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Reflections on Trusting Trust

Reflections on Trusting Trust (pdf), Ken Thompson's acceptance speech for the 1984 Turing Award, in which he discusses creating a backdoor in the C compiler (yes, there was only 1 when he invented the language) that itself creates a second backdoor in the login program when it is compiled. Additionally, it reproduces itself when compiling the C compiler from un-tampered-with source code, so that anyone using the binary (compiled) compiler would be unable to avoid reproducing the backdoor in all its forms. This is the sort of thing that gives security programmers nightmares. 108.162.221.168 04:52, 4 November 2016 (UTC) (bonsaiviking)