research!rsc: Running the “Reflections on Trusting Trust” Compiler | someone finally published Ken Thompson’s actual compiler back door source code

Immediately after watching the video on YouTube in September 2023, I emailed Ken and asked him for the code. Despite my being six months late, he said I was the first person to ask and mailed back an attachment called nih.a, a cryptic name for a cryptic program. (Ken tells me it does in fact stand for “not invented here.”) Normally today, .a files are archives containing compiler object files, but this one contains two source files.

https://research.swtch.com/nih

via https://mstdn.social/@jschauma/111298930868641121

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