Reflections on Trusting Trust.

Thompson, K. (1984). Reflections on Trusting Trust. Communications of the ACM, 27(8), 761-763.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1984

DOI

10.1145/358198.358210

Link

https://doi.org/10.1145/358198.358210

Cited from

computer_science

Cited by

3 citations across 3 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.

Mechanisms

• Reproducible Build or Derivation Check
  • Its strength is catching build-time and toolchain compromise — the class of attack that signatures and inventories sail straight past, because they will happily sign and enumerate a tampered binary that a review of the source would never predict.
• White-Box Audit
  • Ken Thompson's Reflections on Trusting Trust showed that a compiler could be subverted so that inspecting the source reveals nothing wrong, because the corruption lives below the level being read.

Verification

This reference passed the adversarial substantiation pipeline: it was checked to exist and to support the claim it is attached to. See how references were verified.

Registry ID ref:1c7b82ee07ef · see in the full table