UNIX and viruses

Cory Kempf kempf at tci.UUCP
Sat Jun 17 06:17:05 AEST 1989


In article <8800020 at gistdev> flint at gistdev.UUCP writes:
>
>Having the sources to the compiler won't help much: the person who wrote
>the backdoor can have it sitting right there in the code and you probably
>won't know it.  (Yes, if you take the time to figure out what the code is
>doing, for every line of the code, but who is going to do that?  

There is a paper titled "On Trusting Trust", written by Dennis Ritchie
(or was it Ken Thompson? oh well, the two were back to back).  

He brings up some interesting idea about how to insert a bug into
a compiler... As a quick summary, even going through the source
line by line won't help... 

I highly recomend the paper... 
+C


-- 
Cory Kempf		Technology Concepts
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