Self-printing program (was Re: The Scope and Ownership of fedora-list)

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Wed, 2008-08-27 at 18:46 -0400, Chris Tyler wrote:

> This is a short program of the type that Thompson described in
> "Reflections on Trusting Trust"[0].

[...]

> [0] This is an amazing paper.

Agreed. It was Thompson's talk when he and Ritchie received the ACM
Turing Award. Everyone with the slightest interest in security should
read it once a year.

> It describes why you can't trust software
> for which you have audited the source code and compiled your own binary.
> Original PDF from the ACM site:
> http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=358210 
> or html format from Ken Thompson's site at Bell Labs:
> http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

I've more than once had to explain this to otherwise intelligent people
who think they can, say, just run an auditing program to check if a
voting machine is Trojanned.

poc