Re: help a novelist sound credible?

From: Lew Pitcher (lpitcher_at_sympatico.ca)
Date: 05/04/05 

Date: Tue, 03 May 2005 18:28:23 -0400

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Lew Pitcher wrote:
> David Heddle wrote:
> [snip]
>
>>>2) How someone might have hidden that "feature" in the linux source
>>>code, and it remained undetected. I thought about a hash of the magic name
>>>represented in octal and hidden in a C macro somehow.?
>
>
> Ken Thompson (one of the AT&T Bell Labs guys that worked on Unix and C)
> posited that a trojan feature could be added to the OS (Unix, in his
> example) through the actions of the C compiler.

Documented in the "Communication of the ACM" Vol. 27, No. 8, August 1984, pp.
761-763. Copyright © 1984, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.

http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/

- --
Lew Pitcher

Master Codewright & JOAT-in-training | GPG public key available on request
Registered Linux User #112576 (http://counter.li.org/)
Slackware - Because I know what I'm doing.
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