Ken Thompson's 1983 'Reflections on Trusting Trust' Lecture and Its Relevance to Modern Supply Chain Security
By
naves
Sesame, salt, and substance. A flagship bake.
Summary
The article discusses Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture 'Reflections on Trusting Trust,' which addressed supply chain security long before the term became popular. It explores how Thompson demonstrated that compilers could be compromised to insert backdoors, creating a 'trusting trust' problem where we must trust the tools that build our software. The article examines the historical context, technical details of Thompson's compiler hack, and its modern relevance to software supply chain security.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledSupply chain security is a hot topic today, but it is a very old problem.
Ken Thompson chose supply chain security as the topic for his Turing award lecture, although the specific term wasn't used back then.
It is a classic paper, and a short one (3 pages); if you haven't read it yet, you should.
The field of computer science was still young and small enough that the ACM conference where Ken spoke was the 'Annual Conference on Computers.'
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