Well, it's the turtles all the way down, and you always need a peace of trust to step on to keep the whole thing. So there is no absulute security, but I guess this is not a new concept. But IMHO, if someone would like to reduce (not eliminate) the risks, Smalltalk could make it less daunting. Smalltalk VM is small, and well documented in Blue book. one is free to implement its own, may it be slow, it is just important that it works, and that it is not known to public (secret VM, so that it is more difficult to mount attack against it specifically by hacking C compiler). load small (and private) snippet to dump all code (source and byte codes) from the image using both VM-s, run the MD5. Not that here our VM is reading image directly, (well up to the OS that is), hence all the byte codes, and it is relying on what the whole imaga and original VM are telling. To increase security, implement more than one VM in different languages, Smalltalk is simple enough so implementing it in C, assembler, Prolog, and ASIC-s for the purposes of verification is not out of reach for some paranoid and wealthy org. Also run on at least few operating systems. Davorin Rusevljan http://www.cloud208.com/ ----- http://www.cloud208.com/ -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Trusting-Trust-tp4364753p4369147.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk mailing list archive at Nabble.com.