Very cool

Posted Aug 2, 2024 8:43 UTC (Fri) by chris_se (subscriber, #99706)
In reply to: Very cool by Phantom_Hoover
Parent article: Pulling Linux up by its bootstraps

> What would make Thompson’s point is a working demonstration of a backdoor that’s durable to even basic countermeasures, or one found in the wild. Yet more science fictions about what an impossibly perfect program could allegedly do aren’t going to cut it.

I think Thompson's argument is correct in a philosophical sense, but not in a practical sense. I agree with you in that I don't believe that such a super-backdoor doesn't exist.

But other supply chain attacks are real (as we've seen with e.g. the XZ backdoor). And I applaud any work that tries to make it harder and harder for such an attack to occur undetected. Methods that can detect vastly more sophisticated (and possibly unrealistic) attacks will also help detect the more realistic ones.

I also think that most developers aren't thinking enough about supply chain attacks in the modern world. So I'm very excited about projects that push these types of ideas more into the current zeitgeist.