Paper of the Week: Reflections on Trusting Trust

This is part of our “Paper of the Week” series. For more info, check out our introductory blog post.

This week, we have two papers: a paper and a bonus meta-paper. We’ll start with the meta-paper.

How to Read a Paper

Hacker School alum Marcus Malka submitted How to Read a Paper by Srinivasan Keshav, a computer science professor at the University of Waterloo, and three of his students: Hossein Falaki, Earl Oliver, and Sumair Ur Rahman. It was originally published in the July 2007 issue of Computer Communication Review, but the version we’re linking to is a living document and was last updated in 2013.

How to Read a Paper has several useful tips and strategies for effectively reading academic papers. Some of it is geared towards researchers who are peer reviewing papers for their colleagues, but most of the tips are applicable for any reader.

Reflections on Trusting Trust

This week’s paper is Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson. Thompson is the co-creator of the UNIX and Plan 9 operating systems as well as the Go programming language. The paper is adapted from a lecture he gave upon receiving a Turing Award for his hand in the creation of UNIX, and was published in the August 1984 issue of Communications of the ACM. It was submitted by Hacker Schooler Leah Hanson who shared the following:

A short piece by Ken Thompson illustrating that you have to trust your compiler/the people who wrote it: reading the source code [of the compiler, etc.] is not enough to be really sure that the compiler is doing what it should be doing. This had some of the mind-expanding feeling that recursion often gives people when they first grasp it; the malicious binary version of the compiler both affects the next version of the same compiler compiled with it (self-hosting compiler) and some target binary (the one that handles logging into Linux).

A recent related blog post, Countering “Trusting Trust” talks about a way to defend against this attack (given that not all of your compilers are infected by exactly the same attack). This method can have some false positives, in the form of compiler bugs (that are not malicious attacks).

Read Along

We want to let people participate in Paper of the Week, so we’re adding a section called Read Along. If you want to take part in Read Along, all you have to do is read the paper, create an original work in response, and email us a link of what you make by noon Eastern Time on the following Monday. Your original work might be a blog post explaining the paper or any insights it gave you, a program that implements some of the paper’s ideas, or something else entirely. It’s up to you. We’re not promising to publish everything, but our goal is to make Read Along something that’s easy to participate in, so don’t be shy about submitting, even if it’s something small.

This week, Hacker School facilitator Tom Ballinger decided to take on Guy Steele’s challenge to explain garbage collection using only words of one syllable as primitives. You can see the results on his blog.

Happy reading!