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This story strikes me as likely to be exaggerated or invented. It is exactly the scenario described in Ken Thomson's Reflections on Trusting Trust. But unlike
by dzdt 8y ago
This story strikes me as likely to be exaggerated or invented. It is exactly the scenario described in Ken Thomson's Reflections on Trusting Trust. But unlike Thomson, who was developing the compiper, there is no reason a random grad student would have access to recompile the compiler. And if the student gained root access to replace system binaries, why would they bother making the compiler reinfect itself on recompilation?
- microtherion 8y agoThe hardware mentioned was an AT&T 3B2, so this probably would have taken place in the early 1980s. Access policies for such things could be quite different, back then. Even when I was a graduate student a decade later, in a lab with professional administrators, grad students routinely had pretty much all the permissions they would ask for, because we worked odd hours and performed exotic experiments. Policing was done after the fact. To have a grad student in Psychology with that level of programming skill would be rather unusual, though.
- TomVDB 8y agoIn the eighties, all engineering students at my university had access to an IBM 3090 mainframe. There were some CS kids who were way better than the admins at exploiting the system. (I don't remember the details, but the student newspaper once wrote about an exploit that required a coordinated attack with the mainframe of a different university.) The admins were smart enough to befriend those kids and let them help manage the system. Better to have them to your side than to have them as an adversary.