noah mchugh cybersecurity leader. ciso & consultant. cissp, cism.

noah@earth:~$ cat ~/writing/002-ken-thompson.md_

002 — SECURITY

KEN THOMPSON'S BACKDOOR NEVER NEEDED A COMPILER

In 1984 Ken Thompson showed that you can't trust code you didn't totally create yourself. Forty years later we're pulling dependencies from registries maintained by strangers and calling it a supply chain.

The compiler was never the point. The point was trust, and we solved it by trusting more people faster. Every npm install is a Thompson moment we decided not to think about.

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