22m
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security
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intermediate
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2025-12-30
- The Turing Award, often likened to the Nobel Prize of Computer Science, was highlighted by Ken Thompson’s 1984 acceptance speech, where he introduced the “Reflections on Trusting Trust” thought experiment exposing a meta‑backdoor in compilers.
- Thompson’s concept of an “original compiler sin” describes how a maliciously altered compiler can silently embed backdoors into every program it later compiles, creating a self‑propagating security vulnerability that code audits cannot detect.