Reflections on Trusting Trust

Citation: Ken Thompson (1984) Reflections on Trusting Trust. Communications of the ACM (RSS)
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Summary

Illustrates how to add to a computer language with a self-hosting compiler, then how same technique can be used to insert behavior (eg a backdoor) via a compiler into a program, not revealed in the program's source code. One can only trust a program which one did not totally create, which includes lower levels such as hardware microcode.