Re: Linuxfromscratch.org

["Carsten P. Gehrke" <Carsten@rollinghorse.com>]

At 13:49 22-07-03, Dean Anderson wrote:
>if you are looking for integrity, Linuxfromscratch is just the start.
>
>You have to come up with a way to exclude Kerningan-style compiler hacks,
>and similar OS hacks from being inserted into the "clean" source build.
>
>Kernigan, as some will remember, early in Unix days (70s), altered the
>compiler to include a backdoor in login when it compiled login.c, and
>altered the compiler to insert the backdoor-inserter whenever it compiled
>itself.  So even if you recompiled Unix from scratch from clean source,
>you still had a backdoor.  I think even if you retargeted the compiler, it
>still inserted to the apprpropriate backdoor-inserter.  A similar hack can
>be done at the OS level.
>
>                 --Dean

Is this true of the GNU C compiler suite as well?  And if so, would it not 
be possible to remove it from the compiler?  How does it work?  Does it 
look at the code, or is anything called login.c susceptible?  Why has this 
not been removed in the open-source code?  How can I check to see if this 
backdoor exists?

TIA,
Carsten


--
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                             Carsten P. Gehrke
                      mailto:Carsten@RollingHorse.com
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