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Reflections on trusting trust

Author:

Ken ThompsonAuthors Info & Claims

Communications of the ACM, Volume 27, Issue 8

Pages 761 - 763

https://doi.org/10.1145/358198.358210

Published: 01 August 1984 Publication History

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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.

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Kernighan, B.W., and Ritchie, D.M. The C Programming Language. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1978.

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Ritchie, D.M., and Thompson, K. The UNIX time-sharing system. Commun. ACM 17, (July 1974), 365-375.

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Unknown Air Force Document.

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Cited By

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Hou JLiu ZYang ZYang C(2024)Hardware Trojan Attacks on the Reconfigurable Interconnections of Field-Programmable Gate Array-Based Convolutional Neural Network Accelerators and a Physically Unclonable Function-Based Countermeasure Detection TechniqueMicromachines10.3390/mi1501014915:1(149)Online publication date: 19-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/mi15010149
Moyle SMartin AAllott N(2024)XAI Human-Machine collaboration applied to network securityFrontiers in Computer Science10.3389/fcomp.2024.13212386Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomp.2024.1321238
Gal‐Or EHydari MTelang R(2024)Merchants of Vulnerabilities: How Bug Bounty Programs Benefit Software VendorsSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.4808742Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4808742
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Reflections on trusting trust

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Reviews

Reviewer: 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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Published In

Communications of the ACM Volume 27, Issue 8

Aug 1984

90 pages

ISSN:0001-0782

EISSN:1557-7317

DOI:10.1145/358198

Editor:
Peter J. Denning
NASA Ames Research, Moffett Field, CA

Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 August 1984

Published in CACM Volume 27, Issue 8

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Hou JLiu ZYang ZYang C(2024)Hardware Trojan Attacks on the Reconfigurable Interconnections of Field-Programmable Gate Array-Based Convolutional Neural Network Accelerators and a Physically Unclonable Function-Based Countermeasure Detection TechniqueMicromachines10.3390/mi1501014915:1(149)Online publication date: 19-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/mi15010149
Moyle SMartin AAllott N(2024)XAI Human-Machine collaboration applied to network securityFrontiers in Computer Science10.3389/fcomp.2024.13212386Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomp.2024.1321238
Gal‐Or EHydari MTelang R(2024)Merchants of Vulnerabilities: How Bug Bounty Programs Benefit Software VendorsSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.4808742Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4808742
Huberdeau LHamel CMonnier SFeeley MLaemmel RPereira JMosses P(2024)The Design of a Self-Compiling C Transpiler Targeting POSIX ShellProceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering10.1145/3687997.3695639(70-83)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3687997.3695639
Kelly T(2024)Zero Tolerance for BiasQueue10.1145/366464522:2(19-38)Online publication date: 29-May-2024
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Keshani MVelican TBot GProksch S(2024)AROMA: Automatic Reproduction of Maven ArtifactsProceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering10.1145/36437641:FSE(836-858)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2024
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Malka JRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)Increasing trust in the open source supply chain with reproducible builds and functional package managementProceedings of the 2024 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings10.1145/3639478.3639806(184-186)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2024
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Pan ZShen WWang XYang YChang RLiu YLiu CLiu YRen K(2024)Ambush From All Sides: Understanding Security Threats in Open-Source Software CI/CD PipelinesIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1109/TDSC.2023.325357221:1(403-418)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2024
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Clifford EShumailov IZhao YAnderson RMullins R(2024)ImpNet: Imperceptible and blackbox-undetectable backdoors in compiled neural networks2024 IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML)10.1109/SaTML59370.2024.00024(344-357)Online publication date: 9-Apr-2024
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Liu XDuan XHei XWang YSong X(2024)Compiler Differentiation Detection Method for Binary Similarity2024 International Conference on Networking and Network Applications (NaNA)10.1109/NaNA63151.2024.00019(72-77)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2024
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