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A comment on Guix Reduces Bootstrap Seed by Half. Parent comment

Re:Guix Reduces Bootstrap Seed by Half by nwah1 on Wednesday October 09, 2019 @07:43AM (#21202204)
Unless Dennis Ritchie or Ken Thompson placed a "trusting trust" attack in the original C compiler, since virtually all modern code was compiled by something that was once compiled by it.

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

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Re:Guix Reduces Bootstrap Seed by Half by pdw on Wednesday October 09, 2019 @07:57AM (#21202300)
To counter that, they're working on a bootstrap chain that starts with a tiny 500 byte hex editor and ends with a compiler that can build the GNU toolchain.
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Re:Guix Reduces Bootstrap Seed by Half by newnewpdro on Wednesday October 09, 2019 @07:53AM (#21202269)
That's the whole point of these projects - they're preventing that type of attack.

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.

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