[no subject]

Actually, even that is not good enough.  That quote by Ken Thompson is
the moral to the story of Ken's infamous hack of the UNIX C compiler,
which inserted a backdoor into the login command.  Once the hacked
compiler was "in the wild", there was no way to look at any source and
detect the back door.  Even recompiling the C compiler wouldn't help.
The ACM article containing the quote is here:
<a  rel="nofollow" href="http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/";>http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/</a> .  It's well worth the read.

In short, there's no way to absolutely trust software unless you
hand-code your own assembler using nothing but binary opcodes.  Then you
can code a compiler in assembly language and use your trusted assembler
to build it.

But that doesn't take hardware into account...

-- 
Jason Day                                       jasonday at
<a  rel="nofollow" href="http://jasonday.home.att.net";>http://jasonday.home.att.net</a>                    worldnet dot att dot net
 
&quot;Of course I'm paranoid, everyone is trying to kill me.&quot;
    -- Weyoun-6, Star Trek: Deep Space 9


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