In accepting the ACM Turing Award, Ken Thompson described a devious Trojan horse attack on a Unix system, which most people now refer to as Thompson's rigged compiler. This attack changes the binary version of the login program to add a backdoor, say, to allow a new user, 12345, that has password, 67890, which is never checked against the password. Thus, the attacker can always login to this computer using this username and password. Then the attack changes the binary version of the C compiler, so that it checks if it is compiling the source code for the login program, and, if so, it reinserts the backdoor in the binary version. Thus, a system administrator cannot remove this Trojan horse simply by recompiling the login program. In fact, the attack goes a step further, so that the C compiler also checks if it is compiling the source code of the C compiler itself, and, if so, it inserts the extra code that reinserts the backdoor for when it is compiling the login program. So recompiling the C compiler won't remove this attack either, and if anyone examines the source code for the login program or the C compiler, they won't notice that anything is wrong. Now suppose your Unix system has been compromised in this way (which you confirm by logging in as 12345). How can you fix it, without using any outside resources (like a fresh copy of the operating system)?

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If your Unix system has been compromised with Thompsons rigged compiler attack fixing it without ext... View the full answer