Monday, 29 January 2018

What Ken Thompson's seminal (terrifying!) "On Trusting Trust" tells us about the Spectre and Meltdown bugs

When Unix co-inventor Ken Thompson won the Turing Prize for his work, he dropped a bombshell in his acceptance speech: as an exercise, he had buried a back-door so deeply into the Unix infrastructure that no one had ever found it (to his knowledge). (more…)