This reminds me of Ken Thompson's famous Turing Award paper from 1984. In that paper, he described a malicious compiler that added security holes to properly w

This reminds me of Ken Thompson's famous Turing Award paper from 1984. In that paper, he described a malicious compiler that added security holes to properly written C programs. The real question isn't about whether you can trust Microsoft. It's can you even trust Intel? "The moral is obvious. You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code. In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode. As the level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect." http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html