UNIX: A History and a Memoir

by Brian W. Kernighan

When Ken and Dennis won the Turing Award in 1983, Ken’s prescient talk, “Reflections on Trusting Trust,” explained a series of modifications that he could make to a compiler that would eventually install a Trojan horse in the login program for a system. “You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.” As he noted, the same kinds of tricks can be applied to hardware, where they will be even harder to discover. Things have not gotten better in the interim, and the paper is still highly relevant today.

Ive read this paper. I keep a pdf copy. The first time i read it it really freaked me out!