old intentional gcc bug?

[Robert Dewar]

Erik Trulsson wrote:

> And reading Ken's ACM paper (http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/) certainly
> gives me the impression that he is talking about a real program, not just a
> purely hypothetical case:
> 
>   [...]
>   I would like to present to you the cutest program I ever wrote. I
>   will do this in three stages and try to bring it together at the end.
>   [...]
>   The actual bug I planted in the compiler would match code in the UNIX
>   "login" command.

OK, interesting, thanks for info, I had always thought that this
was purely conceptual.

Of course there is nothing special about open source/free software
that makes such attacks more possible. On the contrary, since gcc
can always be built using third party C compilers, it would be
much easier to smoke out and eliminate any such behavior (indeed
this example shows the merit of maintaining the property that gcc
can be compiled by non-gcc compilers), although we have not been
able to maintain that property for the Ada front end.

Of course with a proprietary program, there is no need for such
subterfuge, you just put in whatever nefarious stuff you like
in the front end (it took a while for people to find the flight
simulator in Microsoft Excel).