Reviving and evaluating Thompson's backdoor in OpenBSD's make - Samuel Aubertin - EuroBSDcon 2022
Channel: EuroBSDcon
Date: 2022-10-27

38 years ago Ken Thompson presentedÂ¹ a well-known, binary-only backdoor based on two capabilities of self-hosted compilers: self-replication and their ability to learn.

Other-than-compilers system components are self-hosted,
like OpenBSD's `make`: in order to build a new `make` binary from source, you need an existing `make` executable and this one may have been _educated_ to misbehave!

This talk covers the technical implementation of such backdoor
and tries to evaluate trust-improving techniques for self-hosted
components.

Samuel AUBERTIN is a PhD student in the Systems & Software
Security at EURECOMÂ² and cybersecurity consultant for IBM in France.

1.  [Reflections on Trusting Trust - ACM Turing award
lecture](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf)
2.  [S3@EURECOM](https://www.s3.eurecom.fr/)