"In practice, you’re probably just going to compromise the proprietary platform security modules instead." That's the real problem. It's practical to bootstrap

"In practice, you’re probably just going to compromise the proprietary platform security modules instead." That's the real problem. It's practical to bootstrap software in surprisingly few steps. There are people who can write assembler that can do a basic C compiler, from which we can get a full C compiler, from which the world is our oyster. I'm not that good in assembler myself but I could bootstrap from nothing in another couple of intermediate steps (and a whole bunch of time). Then on top of that you have things like NixOS and Debian pushing for full reproducability, which isn't a panacea on its own but means we get further visibility into what builds produce, and makes it more worthwhile to do a full software bootstrap because it extends the assurance out that much farther. If there is in fact an ancient buried trapdoor in our compiler stacks, whoever put it there better start trying to remove it because it's probably getting close to being discovered. I don't think there is one, but the amount of room for it to hide in is rapidly shrinking. But that does nothing about the hardware that has a backdoor into reading the contents of my harddrive and shoveling them out over Wifi to some arbitrary network destination if the right network packets arrive at my Wifi adapter. My software will never even see these magic packets because the hardware will never deliver them.