As promised, I have posted our first paper to read in the Syllabus. Please check it out. It has only 3 pages and was written by Ken Thompson! This paper might be the formal version of folklore at AT&T Bell Lab.

After Dennis Ritchie and Ken invented C and UNIX together, everyone else (e.g., Rob Pike, Brian Kernighan, Doug McIlroy, etc) started to use UNIX by having an account with a machine. But soon they realized that Dennis always hacked into their account easily. That is UNACCEPTABLE! They carefully inspected the UNIX source file and found a backdoor. They removed the backdoor and believed they nailed it. Then they found Dennis still could log into their accounts… The good/bad news was they could not find another backdoor within UNIX. The mystery was finally revealed by Dennis, who injected a backdoor from the C compiler when compiling UNIX. Yes, everyone used the same compiler Dennis wrote…

We will continue our trusted vs. trustworthy discussion by looking into different attacks. Meanwhile, stay tuned for the final assignment and projects.