Ken Thompson – quotes – Reflections on Trust
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/12/21
Some of the [Wayback] Ken Thompson – Wikiquote entries come from a great [Wayback] 1983 ACM Turing Award Acceptance Lecture [Wayback] “Reflections on Trusting Trust”.
That lecture used to be on http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html
But it isn’t, and was not in the WayBack machine and neither in the Google Cache [Archive.is] because of the [Wayback/Archive.is] robots.txt. Historic link rot galore!
Edit 20210728: by now it is in the Wayback machine again; the earliest archived copy is from 2001, it also shows that as of april 2015 it is gone from the bell labs server.
The lecture is about [Wayback] compiler viruses and viruses actually did this at least a few times: Wayback: Delphi in 2009 and to [Wayback] XCode in 2015.
A few nice links from [Wayback] ACM Classic: Reflections on Trusting Trust – Google Groups though:
- [Wayback] Countering “Trusting Trust” – Schneier on Security.
- [Wayback] Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC) – Countering Trojan Horse attacks on Compilers.
- [Wayback] The Ken Thompson Hack.
And archived versions of (I hope accurate) copies of the article:
- [Wayback] Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP) | SCS | UW at the University of Waterloo has it online and archived.
- [Wayback] ouah.org has it online and archived too.
Finally I found a PDF copy of the original ACM prints that Greg Ganger of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University has online. It’s archived too.
–jeroen
Further reading:
- (Gone with G+) Really neat concept by Ken Thompson that I read about many years ago. Embed a virus into a compiler that infects any compilers that it compiles, thus… – Koushik Dutta (Koush) – Google+
- [Wayback] Strange Loops: Ken Thompson and the Self-referencing C Compiler – Good Math, Bad Math.
- [Wayback] linux – Is Ken Thompson’s compiler hack still a threat? – Programmers Stack Exchange.
- Wayback: Virus infects development environment – News – The H Security: News and features.
- [Wayback] Compiler virus infects thousands of programs.
- [Wayback] Compile-a-virus – W32/Induc-A | Naked Security.
- [Wayback] Novel Malware XcodeGhost Modifies Xcode, Infects Apple iOS Apps and Hits App Store – Palo Alto Networks BlogPalo Alto Networks Blog.
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
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