Reflections on Trusting Trust

To what extent should one trust a statement that a program is free of Trojan horses? Perhaps it is more important to trust the people who wrote the software. ACM

This classic paper by Ken Thompson introduces the idea that as a software developer you have to trust your compiler. However your compiler could add behaviour to your program without you realising it.

There's some evidence in a Usetnet archive that Ken carried this out. Article Archive

There's a counter called Diverse Double-Compiling.