Reflections on Trusting Trust.¶
Thompson, K. (1984). Reflections on Trusting Trust. Communications of the ACM, 27(8), 761-763.
Cited by¶
5 citations across 5 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Trusted Intermediary Compromise
- Software supply chain. A compromised build server ships signed updates carrying a trojan to thousands of customers; a subverted maintainer commits a backdoor into a widely used library that propagates into every downstream distribution.
This sourceCanonical demonstration that a trusted compiler can propagate an undetectable backdoor downstream — the original trust-transitivity supply-chain attack.
Supported in partVerified against the work's full text
Thompson shows a subverted compiler, a trusted build tool, silently inserting Trojan horses into everything it compiles; build servers, signed updates and library maintainers are not discussed.
“We can now remove the bugs from the source of the compiler and the new bi nary will reinsert the bugs whenever it is compiled.”
- Software supply chain. A compromised build server ships signed updates carrying a trojan to thousands of customers; a subverted maintainer commits a backdoor into a widely used library that propagates into every downstream distribution.
Domain-specific¶
- AI Supply-Chain Attack
- The defence is provenance — hash-pinning, signed artefacts, reproducible builds — which converts that assumption from something assumed into something checked; producer reputation does not. Not a uniquely AI mechanism. The attack geometry — payload placed at a trusted upstream node, propagated by an indistinguishable channel, imported under an unverified trust assumption — is the classical trusted-intermediary pattern (SolarWinds, xz-utils), not something new to AI
This sourceThe classical framing that trusting a program requires trusting the people who wrote it, not a proof of its freedom from Trojan horses.
Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract
“To what extent should one trust a statement that a program is free of Trojan horses? Perhaps it is more important to trust the people who wrote the software.”
- The defence is provenance — hash-pinning, signed artefacts, reproducible builds — which converts that assumption from something assumed into something checked; producer reputation does not. Not a uniquely AI mechanism. The attack geometry — payload placed at a trusted upstream node, propagated by an indistinguishable channel, imported under an unverified trust assumption — is the classical trusted-intermediary pattern (SolarWinds, xz-utils), not something new to AI
Mechanisms¶
- Reproducible Build or Derivation Check
- Staged Self-Host Build
- Its strength is converting an impossible self-reference into a finite, ordered ladder in which every rung is small, capability-checked, and reachable from the one below — ending in a system that provably builds itself.
This sourceDescribes a staged compiler bootstrap that resolves self-reference and culminates in a compiler capable of compiling itself.
- Its strength is converting an impossible self-reference into a finite, ordered ladder in which every rung is small, capability-checked, and reachable from the one below — ending in a system that provably builds itself.
- White-Box Audit
Verification¶
Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.
Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 2 of 5 citations: 2 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.
Was it audited? Yes. A second, independent pass read the citation against the article text and recorded a verdict.
Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.
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