[binary132]

This is where the security stuff starts going down the rabbit-hole into Wonderland. I’m still trying to figure out how to write a compiler that won’t be subject to the “what if my ur-compiler was infected with a virus that only infects compilers” problem....

[schoen]

There's lots of work on that problem!

https://dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/

There are also a number of people making minimal OSes, interpreters, and compilers that you can, for example, assemble by hand and type in "from scratch".

There was a nice list of those that I can't find right now, but you could look at

https://bootstrappable.org/projects/mes.html

as one example in this direction.

[kube-system]

The rabbit hole goes further with UEFI, components embedded in PCBs, microcode, HDL synthesizers, etc.

To make a perfectly secure system, the first step is to obtain high purity sand.

[schoen]

Yes, you can definitely get very severe attacks from backdoored hardware. Some of them appear almost impossible to defend against with software alone.

On the bright side, it's hard to imagine that many of these attacks will be self-propagating, which is the particularly insidious thing about the Trusting Trust attack. Yes, hardware is used to design hardware, but typically in a more indirect and heterogeneous way than the "compiler compiling itself" scenario. To be concrete, I'd say Microsoft or Canonical has much more to fear from a Trusting Trust sort of attack than Intel does, but the software developers also have better options to contain or detect such an attack.

[creole_wither]

There's an idea for hard sci-fi. Silicon backdoored with nanobots in sand.