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This brings to mind Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust"[1] -- after all, all I have to do to write code with the exploit is be able to remove the patch and rebuild the compiler and build some executables.

Trusting in a compiler you hope was used to build all the executables on your system isn't trustworthy enough to be the final solution.

[1] https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html



Every modern compiler usually has extensions that allow for bits of assembly to be inserted alongside the usual C or C++ code.

Unless the compiler is also patched to either disallow inserted assembly, or to modify the inserted assembly (this being both hard and dangerous), someone who wants to exploit the bug will just add their own inserted assembly code that exploits the bug, and a patched compiler won't help one bit in that case.




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