Reflections on Trusting Trust
The work
| Authors | Ken Thompson |
|---|---|
| Editors | |
| 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 |
| ISSN | 0001-0782 |
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.
A copy is held
pdf, 2.5 MB. Not published — it may be under copyright. The facts and links here are.
How it got here
| How it got here | agent via openalex |
|---|---|
| Added | 2026-08-05 00:00 UTC |
| Approved by | a person 2026-09-04 18:18 UTC |
Cite it as
@article{thompson1984reflections,
title = {Reflections on Trusting Trust},
author = {Ken Thompson},
year = {1984},
journal = {Communications of the ACM},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
volume = {27},
number = {8},
pages = {761--763},
issn = {0001-0782},
doi = {10.1145/358198.358210},
}
This record lives at https://refs.drheap.org/thompson1984reflections/ and will keep doing so.