Why no Easter Eggs?

Larry Osterman s WebLog Why no Easter Eggs | debt solutions

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??El Office 2003 tiene huevos de pascua? | hilpers

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Google Airlines » El Blog de Enrique Dans

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Another year, another post

Larry Osterman's WebLog — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 20:21:22 GMT

Well, this year I didn't miss the anniversary of my first blog post.
I still can't quite believe it's...

re: Why no Easter Eggs?

daffy@sbate.com — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 20:15:54 GMT

I applaud this policy as a security engineer.

re: Why no Easter Eggs?

BassOMatic — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 13:21:46 GMT

A good story about "why no easter eggs" is the tale of the Adobe Photoshop easter egg that was snuck in by a developer and therefore wasn't tested. Of course, it had a globalization bug which caused it to crash on systems that used double-byte characters, so there was much embarrassment when, one April 1st, the application became useless in various squiggly-text-using countries around the world. The embarrassment was so great in Japan that Adobe actually went to the trouble of printing stickers apologizing for the problem and slapped them on the boxes sold in Japan.

re: Why no Easter Eggs?

TC — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 08:36:00 GMT

SPJ wrote:
> Oh and yes, the CPU which executes the code needs to be trusted!

Indeed, I gather that some of the CPU microcode update procedures, are now well-known publically. So I guess, with enough smarts, you /could/ trojan a modern CPU. For those not aware, google on "microcode update" (including the quotes) for lots of relevant hits.

re: Why no Easter Eggs?

SPJ — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 23:14:05 GMT

Carlos -
From the Ken Thompson article - "Figure 6 shows a simple modification to the compiler that will deliberately miscompile source whenever a particular pattern is matched. If this were not deliberate, it would be called a compiler "bug." Since it is deliberate, it should be called a "Trojan horse." "

In my post, I said we need the compiler source and library source and the OS source etc. to be sure enough to trust a program. You _can_ trust source code, not infected binaries of compiler that produces untrustworthy code from trustworthy source. So if you have source for everything you can theorotically verify that it does what it is supposed to do and just that.

Oh and yes, the CPU which executes the code needs to be trusted!