Snowden and Compilers

[bill.stewart@pobox.com (Bill Stewart)]

At 06:42 PM 2/12/2014, Peter Gutmann wrote:
> >http://www.livehacking.com/tag/network-card-backdoor/
> >
> >Proof of concept was been proven in 2010.  Practical application 
> is probably
> >being done by now.  Somebody is asleep behind the wheel if it is not.
>
>It was demonstrated well before then, Arrigo Triulzi had demonstrated running
>an SSH server inside a NIC several years earlier.

Back in the mid-80s I ran a secure computer center (with a huge VAX 11/780 :-)
and the Army/DoD/NIST rules for secure computers needed to know who wrote the
channel programs that the computer was using.  Channels were a mainframe thing,
which predated the VAX; the closest equivalent we had was a KMC11 processor
that sat in the Unibus and handled interrupts and cooked-mode input 
for the serial cards.

So yes, proofs of concept have been around for a while :-)