On Thursday 11 January 2007 19:23, Paul Abrahams wrote:
Many years ago Ken Thompson (or maybe it was Dennis Ritchie) gave the ACM Turing Lecture on, essentially, coding tricks. He showed how it was possible to booby-trap a compiler using repeated bootstraps in such a way that the compiler was corrupted, yet its visible source code was clean. Recompiling the compiler would retain the corruption. And such a corrupted compiler could do anything, of course.
Actually what he showed was that the compilers couldn't do anything. They were useless in the real world. If you want to hunt ghosts, go see what's burned in silicon in the chips on the motherboards, nics, and routers. Stop fantasizing about secrets hidden in open source. -- _____________________________________ John Andersen -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org