Reflections on Trusting Trust
The work
| Title | Reflections on Trusting Trust |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ken Thompson |
| Type | article |
| Year | 1984 |
| Citekey | thompson1984reflections |
Where it appeared
| Published in | Communications of the ACM |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 8 |
| Pages | 761--763 |
Identifiers
| DOI | 10.1145/358198.358210 |
|---|---|
| OpenAlex | W2170267084 |
Access
| Landing page | https://doi.org/10.1145/358198.358210 |
|---|---|
| Free full text | https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/358198.358210 |
Abstract
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.
Copy held
| Kind | PDF, 2.6 MB |
|---|---|
| Retrieved | 2026-08-06 |
| Held | local, for personal reference |
| Where it came from | https://doi.org/10.1145/358198.358210 |
Where this came from
| How it got here | the agent went looking · found via openalex |
|---|---|
| First seen | 2026-08-05 |
| Standing | endorsed |
| Approved | 2026-08-06 |
Cite it as
@article{thompson1984reflections,
title = {Reflections on Trusting Trust},
author = {Ken Thompson},
year = {1984},
journal = {Communications of the ACM},
volume = {27},
number = {8},
pages = {761--763},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
doi = {10.1145/358198.358210},
url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/358198.358210},
}
This record lives at https://refs.drheap.org/thompson1984reflections/ and will keep doing so.