wormhole ==>
back door
<security> (Or "trap door", "wormhole"). A hole in the security of a
system deliberately left in place by designers or maintainers. The motivation
for such holes is not always sinister; some operating systems, for example, come
out of the box with privileged accounts intended for use by field service
technicians or the vendor's maintenance programmers. See also iron box, cracker,
worm, logic bomb.
Historically, back doors have often lurked in systems longer than anyone
expected or planned, and a few have become widely known. The infamous RTM worm
of late 1988, for example, used a back door in the BSD Unix "sendmail(8)"
utility.
Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM revealed the existence of a
back door in early Unix versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly
clever security hack of all time. The C compiler contained code that would
recognise when the "login" command was being recompiled and insert some code
recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system
whether or not an account had been created for him.
Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code
for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler,
you have to *use* the compiler - so Thompson also arranged that the compiler
would *recognise when it was compiling a version of itself*, and insert into the
recompiled compiler the code to insert into the recompiled "login" the code to
allow Thompson entry - and, of course, the code to recognise itself and do the
whole thing again the next time around! And having done this once, he was then
able to recompile the compiler from the original sources; the hack perpetuated
itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and active but with no trace in
the sources.
The talk that revealed this truly moby hack was published as ["Reflections on
Trusting Trust", "Communications of the ACM 27", 8 (August 1984), pp. 761--763].
[Jargon File]
(1995-04-25)
Nearby terms:
backbone « backbone cabal « backbone site « back
door
» back-end » Back End Generator » Back End Generator
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