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What is the OCaml Graydon Backdoor? I can't find any reference to it.

• Manishearth 10y ago
  rustc was originally written in OCaml by Graydon Hoare. Hypothetically, Graydon could have inserted a trusting trust attack in the ocaml compiler that would also insert a version of itself inside rustc. Highly unlikely; very hard to do, but ... possible.
  • Gankro 10y ago
    The more impressive part is: that manages to self-preserve across hundreds of Rust language/compiler versions with wildly varying designs and semantics all the way up to today's version.
    • steveklabnik 10y ago
      NB:hundreds is literal here. A little over 300 last I checked.
      • Gankro 10y ago
        About this many: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/235d77457d80b549dad3ac36d94f235208a1eafb/src/snapshots.txt https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/235d77457d80b549dad3a... (This file is no longer in master because the compiler bootstraps from the previous stable release; too lazy to accurately isolate the last time it was updated)
        • steveklabnik 10y ago
          Yup, plus since you need to compile three times on each one, to do the bootstrapping...
  • duaneb 10y ago
    That would be some gorgeous code to maintain itself successfully all this time.
• deleted 10y ago
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