Re: having source code for your CPU chip -- NOT

[David Honig]

At 06:38 PM 9/23/99 -0400, Eli Brandt wrote:
>Arnold Reinhold wrote:
>> Perry, if you really believe that the question of whether a given 
>> lump of object code contains a Thompson Trap is formally undecidable 
>> I'd be interested in seeing a proof. Otherwise Herr Goedel has 
>> nothing to do with this.
>
>That sure smells undecidable to me.  Any non-trivial predicate P on

Folks, its not that complex.  Thompson suggested that
the trojan compiler subvert only login and compiler code.   The trojan
would not subvert generic
code; no funky Godelian self-referential stuff is necessary.  Of course,
this was before the 90s: the net, downloadable
code, chronically lame OSes made other approaches much easier.