Rich Kulawiec writes:
> On Mon, Nov 16, 1998 at 06:21:34PM -0800, Javilk wrote:
> > As I recall, the ATT version of UNIX, at one point, had a built-in
> > back door generator put there by one of the guys who designed it. [...]
>
> This is close to what happened, but not quite.
>
> The author of this was Ken Thompson, who along with Dennis Ritchie,
> is credited with co-authorship of Unix. And AT&T did not discover
> this bug -- *nobody* discovered this, because he did something very, very
> clever by embedding it in the binary, not the source, of the C compiler.
>
> The story is contained in the lecture that he gave on receiving
> the ACM's Turing Award (with Dennis), "Reflections on Trusting Trust".
> It's been reprinted in any number of places, for example "ACM Turing
> Award Lectures: The First Twenty Years, 1966-1985", ACM Press, Ed. by
> Ashenhurst and Graham, ISBN 0-201-07794-9.
>
> I've often wondered how many times I propagated Ken's trojan horse
> for him. ;-)
So do I. From my very hazy recollection, the point of the talk
was not that he *did* embed such a back-door generator into the
compiler, but that he *could* have. In other words, trust has to
start somewhere. And frankly, I trust Linux more than I trust
Microsoft.
Come to think of it, Linux (and Open Source software) work much
the way large chunks of the United States government work; by making
many people party to the operations of government (12 people in a
jury, or many, many people involved in tallying election results, from
the local level on up) we make it more difficult for a conspiracy to
subvert the system. Not that it's impossible, just that they now have
to get *many* people subverted. And every one is a possible risk of
exposure of the conspiracy.
Steven J. Owens
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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