When Ken Thompson won the Turing Award jointly with Dennis Ritchie for their work in UNIX, he was expected like other Turing winners to write a paper that would be published in the ACM Computer Journal. What he ended up submitting was a paper about "the cutest program [he] ever wrote"-- a sneaky undetectable self-reproducing "Trojan horse" backdoor in the C compiler that would allow him to log into affected machines as any user.

Thompson didn’t want to write about the usual things that Turing award winners write about— in fact, according to him,1 he didn’t want to write a paper at all. However, when he did finally write a paper (after putting it off for a year past the original deadline, see ~2:52:49 in the above video), he describes at a high level how the C compiler (itself a program written in C) parses and compiles C source code into machine code to set the stage for how the “Trojan horse” would be injected into the generated machine code while leaving the original input C source code seemingly unmodified.

  • Eldritch@piefed.worldEnglish
    5·
    2 days ago

    Oh, same here. And if you like that video, the others are generally about the same level. She’s not generally doing reverse engineering and security analysis on her streams, much more general stuff. But she definitely comes off as knowing what she’s talking about.

    There is a British YouTuber though that has done a number of streams etc. on cracking game DRMs for old video games however. And he’s generally interesting too.