On Wed, 9 Nov 2005, C Y wrote:
Years ago Ken Thompson proposed a diabolical attack on a computer that
could be made by putting a trap door in a compiler, which would
automatically build it into all software and subsequent versions of
itself, undetectibly. (I think this is the article:
http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/) That kind of thing makes people
(especially open source folk, I think) suspect all binaries, and for
good reason.
Yes. I dislike having any binaries in my system I have not compiled
myself. Therefore, I use Gentoo (installed from stage 1, so I recompiled
gcc too). Of course, this does not help against the Thompson's attack.
Not in light of things like Ken Thompson's proposed attack. Security
people may be paranoid, but on the internet paranoia is a virtue.
As one of my colleges said,
For a sysadmin, the absense of paranoia is called professional
incompetence.
Sorry for off-topic.
Andrey
_______________________________________________
Axiom-developer mailing list
Axiom-developer@nongnu.org
http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
