Moral from the original ACM paper: “The moral is obvious. You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from com- panies that employ people like me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code. In demonstrating the possi- bility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware mi- crocode. As the level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well-installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.”