Ken Thompson
Abstract
To what extent should one trust a statement that a program is free of Trojan horses? Perhaps it is more important to trust the people who wrote the software.
References
- 1 Bobrow, D.G., Burchfiel, J.D., Murphy, D.L., and Tomlinson, R.S. TENEX, a paged time-sharing system for the PDP-10. Commun. ACM 15, 3 (Mar. 1972), 135-143. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- 2 Kernighan, B.W., and Ritchie, D.M. The C Programming Language. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1978. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 3 Ritchie, D.M., and Thompson, K. The UNIX time-sharing system. Commun. ACM 17, (July 1974), 365-375. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 4 Unknown Air Force Document.Google Scholar
Index Terms
Reflections on trusting trust
Reviews
Grady Gaston Early
Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture is a fascinating glimpse at a current sociological phenomenon :V unauthorized access to computer systems. The first part of the lecture deals with a hacker's delight :V in C, of course. The second part extends the idea to illustrate how a compiler in this case, the C compiler can be made completely portable. The final extension, in the third part of the lecture, deals with untraceable insertions of Trojan Horses into program translators. The moral is unsettling, as well as obvious: If you didn't write it, you can't trust it.:L
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