I worked on a contract for about a year and a half on a subproject of the research program described in this New York Times article:

  https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/science/rethinking-the-computer-at-80.html

The organizing principle was that every piece of code and data was owned by a well-defined system entity with well-defined permissions that were proven correct both statically and dynamically. For example, sending data to an endpoint that did not have the required authorization to receive it was a type error.

The thinking was that the state of the art is so broken (from the point of view of data integrity and security) that it's necessary to start from scratch. The overarching project name, appropriately enough, was "Clean Slate".

I don't know what they're up to now.

Isn't that pretty unlikely even if all the compilers are uncompromised?

Debian is currently sitting at around 93% of packages being reproducibly built. NixOS is close to 99% of the minimal install image set (https://r13y.com/).

- is deterministic,

- does not invoke undefined behavior, and

- was correctly compiled by the original compilers.

Relying on security through obscurity is bad, but you need some obscurity.

Passwords and keyfiles are ultimately a form of security through obscurity.

(Ken Thompson coined the term and knows how to do it.)

If you implement your bootstrap C compiler entirely in machine code for instance, it doesn't matter if the "original C compiler" is compromised, since it's not being compiled.

I'd be curious to learn more about this.

I'm ruminating on the potential for "regular" electric signals to carry quantum information, that's the next aspect of security to consider with quantum around the corner.

So don't worry, there are and will be bigger things to worry about.

Maybe starting from something like an Arduino is a better route for that.