Ken Thompson – quotes – Reflections on Trust

Some of the Ken Thompson – Wikiquote entries come from a great 1983 ACM Turing Award Acceptance Lecture “Reflections on Trusting Trust”.

That lecture used to be on http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

But it isn’t, and it’s not in the WayBack machine and neither in the Google Cache because of the robots.txt. Historic link rot galore!

The lecture is about compiler viruses and viruses actually did this at least a few times: Delphi in the 2009 and to XCode in 2015.

A few nice links from ACM Classic: Reflections on Trusting Trust – Google Groups though:

• Countering “Trusting Trust” – Schneier on Security.
• Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC) – Countering Trojan Horse attacks on Compilers.
• The Ken Thompson Hack.

And archived versions of (I hope accurate) copies of the article:

• Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP) | SCS | UW at the University of Waterloo has it online and archived.
• 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:

• 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+
• Strange Loops: Ken Thompson and the Self-referencing C Compiler – Good Math, Bad Math.
• linux – Is Ken Thompson’s compiler hack still a threat? – Programmers Stack Exchange.
• Virus infects development environment – News – The H Security: News and features.
• Compiler virus infects thousands of programs.
• Compile-a-virus – W32/Induc-A | Naked Security.
• Novel Malware XcodeGhost Modifies Xcode, Infects Apple iOS Apps and Hits App Store – Palo Alto Networks BlogPalo Alto Networks Blog.