On 02/08/2012 10:33 AM, Stéphane Ducasse wrote:
On Feb 8, 2012, at 9:35 AM, Philippe Marschall wrote:
On 02/07/2012 02:47 PM, Ben Coman wrote:
This is slightly paranoid thinking, but considering the long evolution of Smalltalk live images (apparently all the way from the original Xerox PARC ST80 [1] ) in relation to Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust" [2] - are there any mechanisms to prevent trojan code living undetected inside a Smalltalk compiler/decompiler ? Bruce Schneier [3] provides a shorter overview of [2] if that is not to your taste.
To what degree might this ever be an issue with Pharo and how might it be mitigated ?
I think it's worse in Pharo because you're never bootstrapping from source. From all you know the tools could be subverted to show you a different code than is actually running in the system.
well I do not think so since we can all read the code.
No, read the argument again. If the compiler is compromised and the other tools in the image are compromised you can't read the code because the tools don't display you the actual code. Cheers Philippe