Trusting-Trust Attack Hits Entire Linux Distribution via strip Utility
Trusting-Trust Attack against an Entire Linux Distribution
Ken Thompson's classic trusting-trust attack was thought to require a compiler. Researchers show it can be done with GNU strip, a utility that neither reads nor writes source code. By tampering with a single strip binary in the NixOS bootstrap seed, they implant a payload that propagates through generations of strip and survives into the final system. On a real nixpkgs revision, the attack builds a complete graphical installer and backdoors nearly all its binaries, enabling arbitrary malicious behavior.
A single tampered strip in the binary seed implants a payload that propagates from one generation of strip to the next and survives into the final standard environment after the seed leaves the dependency closure.