I've been searching long and hard but cannot seem to find it. I hope that what little I remember from it is enough and some kind soul will help me find the original article online... :)
Thank you for solving this mystery. :)
It would have been more evil to do it the original way, as described in Thompson's paper: recognize the program sources and emit altered object code only; no mucking with the source.
I don't quite understand this part. How would this work?
They compiled the clean source using the existing, malicious compiler installation. That compiler had a counter-measure against being recompiled from clean sources; it recognized that situation and perpetrated itself.
(A clean compiler binary might not help; suppose the trick involves other binaries, like the C library. They didn't have the kernel source so it was fairly reasonable to regard the kernel as clean.)
The only solution is be to download a binary compiler from someone you trust.
Even when I was a graduate student a decade later, in a lab with professional administrators, grad students routinely had pretty much all the permissions they would ask for, because we worked odd hours and performed exotic experiments. Policing was done after the fact.
To have a grad student in Psychology with that level of programming skill would be rather unusual, though.
The admins were smart enough to befriend those kids and let them help manage the system. Better to have them to your side than to have them as an adversary.
A good, fun read. Thank you!
