reflections on trusting trust

papershelf.md

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 <a href="http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/propositions-as-types/propositions-as-types.pdf" class="btn btn-large btn-inverse" style="width: 100px;"><span class="icon-bookmark icon-white"></span> Read it</a>
 
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+## Reflections on Trusting Trust
+
+*Ken Thompson*
+
+This very beautiful and short paper first presents the possibility of quines:
+self-reproducing programs. It then introduces the idea of evolving a C
+compiler by adding features to the compiler that, once compiled, can be used
+in the source language the compiler is written in, playing with the idea of
+bootstrapping.
+
+Finally, these two ideas come together, when the compiler is attacked and a
+trojan horse is injected into a compiler, which then is able to add itself to
+any future version of the compiler. It is almost as if the compiler has been
+learnt something that is not visible from the outside.
+
+It raises some interesting questions about trusting compilers and CPUs indeed.
+
+<a href="http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~cse509/p761-thompson.pdf" class="btn btn-large btn-inverse" style="width: 100px;"><span class="icon-bookmark icon-white"></span> Read it</a>
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