did you know his guys ? Ken Thompson

Ken Thompson
American computer scientist and legendary programmer.
He co-created Unix, invented the B language, co-created the C language, and later co-created the Go language at Google. He also won the Turing Award (the highest honor in computer science).
He is widely regarded as one of the greatest programmers of all time.

Once upon a time, there was a brilliant programmer named Ken Thompson. He helped create Unix and the C language. One day he decided to show the world a quiet and terrifying trick.
He took the normal C compiler — the program that turns human code into real programs — and secretly taught it two rules.
Rule 1: Whenever you compile the login program, quietly insert a backdoor. Anyone who types the secret password can enter as root, no questions asked.
Rule 2: Whenever you compile a new version of the compiler itself, also insert both of these rules into the new compiler.
Then Ken did something clever. He used this bad compiler to build a fresh compiler. After that, he deleted every trace of the bad rules from the source code. The source now looked completely clean and honest.
From that moment on, the infection lived only inside the binary.
Now imagine this: A company builds what they believe is a highly secure system. They carefully write a login page. They review every line of source code. Everything looks perfect. No backdoors. No secret passwords. Nothing suspicious.
But they used the infected compiler to build it.
So when the system is finished, the login program secretly contains the backdoor.
Anyone who knows the secret password that Ken inserted can simply type it and walk in as the most powerful user — even if the real password is completely different and the source code shows no such thing.
That is the real danger of Ken Thompson’s idea:
You can build what looks like a perfect, secure system. You can check every line of code. But if the tool that compiled it was dishonest, a hidden door still exists — and only the person who knows the secret rule can open it.
Ken later removed the backdoor. He never left it in the real systems. But he left the world with a deep lesson:
You can clean the source. You can trust the code you see. But if the tool that builds the code is lying… the truth never reaches the machine.
That is the story of the Trusting Trust attack.

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