Reflections on Trusting Trust is a classic lecture by Ken Thompson, which is well worth a read. http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.

Reflections on Trusting Trust is a classic lecture by Ken Thompson, which is well worth a read. http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thomps... I always thought that needing to trust a large binary blob (your bootstrapping compiler) was a fundamental limitation with computers that would be impossible to overcome. It is delightful to hear of a solution to it. It's one of those things which is almost obvious in hindsight but takes a leap of imagination to discover, I think.