17 Dec
2003
17 Dec
'03
11:17 p.m.
Read Ken Thompson's Turing Award lecture for why that isn't sufficient. Its quite amusing. I'm quite familiar with the work. [For those who aren't, it's about compilers that compile in self-perpetuating bugs from their own source code.] The question, however, is not one of possibility but timeliness. Attacks against persistent information are easier than attacks against transient information. If the sysadmin is going to go modifying compilers, it's no longer annoyance. Eric