Trusting-Trust Attack Against an Entire Linux Distribution via strip
signa11 · hn · 2026-09-05
A new arXiv paper demonstrates a variant of Ken Thompson's classic trusting-trust attack that uses the innocuous-looking strip utility to backdoor an entire Linux distribution's build chain, keeping malware invisible at source level and persistent across rebuilds. The work extends the attack from a single compiler to distro-scale, showing supply-chain audits must cover every build tool.
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