Saturday, September 26, 2020

Alan Turing, undecidable problems, and malware

Alan Turing, undecidable problems, and malware: "In 1983, Turing Award winner Ken Thompson argued that an evil compiler could automatically insert a secret backdoor into every program it generates, and that no one could know about it because every “trace of malice” in the compiler’s source code could be removed. The moral, Ken wrote, is that you cannot trust code that you do not “totally” create yourself – including the compiler."