Trusting-Trust Attack against an Entire Linux Distribution

In other words: AI can not be trusted.

AI could enable script kiddies to pull this off.

From TFA:

> Ken Thompson's trusting-trust attack [...] is widely regarded as a threat specific to compilers. We show that it is not

And yet, from Reflections On Trusting Trust:

> In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode.

The paper is certainly a nice worked-out example of the attack, which is worthwhile, but it's not novel.

I'm glad they mention Wheeler's work briefly in section 7.2, since it provides a general counter to the trusting-trust attack that a lot of people seem to not know about. They dismiss it as not applying in this case, but I'm not really convinced by their argument. It's true if you only replace the compiler and run in the same environment then it won't help, but IIRC Wheeler's approach treats the environment itself as a parameter to diversify on. So not just the compiler, but also the host/OS, and even the hardware. Thus it's trivial to extend it to strip. Build binutils from source with your bad distro toolchain, fixup with your distro strip, call this build A. Then build binutils from source in a diverse environment, which includes fixup with a diverse stripper, call this B. Then do a rebuild (same diverse environment) but with B's toolchain and stripper, call this C, and compare C with A. Mismatch busts the attack.

“Widely regarded” still applies, I think.