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Trusting trust attacks! Yay!
by qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Trusting trust attacks! Yay!
- batistuta 10y agoIndeed. I think it's a pretty good idea to reread the Trusting Trust paper by Ken Thompson from time to time. Here is an annotated version http://fermatslibrary.com/s/reflections-on-trusting-trust http://fermatslibrary.com/s/reflections-on-trusting-trust
- uluyol 10y agoThis work is in no way related to trusting trust. In Ken Thompson's work, you have a booby trapped compiler injecting code into programs and newly compiled compilers. Here you have a hardware attack that you can trigger using a magic sequence of instructions and go into kernel mode.
- rspeer 10y agoThis was brought up the last time it was posted, to the extent of the post itself being given a confusing, clickbaity, editorializing title about Ken Thompson. But I don't see it as the same thing. Ken Thompson showed that he could hide a backdoor in a compiler where you'd think you could verify the compiler as safe, by reading its source code and even compiling from that source code, but in fact it was sneakily changing its own source code as it compiled it. This demonstration, on the other hand, is saying that they can hide a backdoor in a microchip, where you can't verify it as safe. The chip is not, for example, making the sneaky capacitor disappear when you use the computer to view schematics of the chip. I don't see where "trusting trust" is involved, just "trust".