Dissertation Errata for “Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling”

David A. Wheeler

2011-09-17

There are a few minor errata in my PhD dissertation “Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling”. These errata are trivial and do not impact the fundamentals of anything in the dissertation.

Here are the dissertation errata:

In the List of Abbreviations and Symbols, page xii: The definition for “OS/360” is listed as “IBM System/390 operating-system”, but it should be “IBM System/360 Operating System”.
Section 5.1, second paragraph, page 45: The phrase “that is identical to the c_A” should not include “the”.
Section 5.2, table 1 (FOL notation), page 50: In the row for “τ₁≠τ₂” (ASCII “tau_1 != tau_2”), the text “Equivalent to ¬(Φ=Ψ)” should be “Equivalent to ¬(τ₁=τ₂)”. That row cannot be equivalent to anything involving Phi or Psi, since Phi and Psi were not in the original expression. (This was an incompletely modified copy and paste from an earlier row.)
Section 5.3, fourth bullet (Copy...flip), page 52: The text “given Φ=Ψ, this rationale can produce Ψ=Φ” should probably read “given τ₁=τ₂, this rationale can produce τ₂=τ₁”. It can be argued that this isn’t an error, but elsewhere Φ and Ψ are used to represent arbitrary formulas, while “=” is only used for comparing terms.
Section 5.7.8, page 82: There is a doubled period when there should be just one; “when compiling s_A..” should be “when compiling s_A.”. Also, “a official” should be “an official”.
Section 7.1.2, Figure 5, page 101: In Stage 2, label “1:0” should be “2:0”, and label “1:1” should be “2:1” (otherwise the labels duplicate the labels of stage 1). (This was another incompletely modified copy and paste.)
Section 7.1.4, first line, page 105: The text “The tcc outputs” should be “The tcc compiler outputs”.
Section 8.11, page 129: The text “sot that” should be “so that”.
Section 8.13, page 136: The text “to compiler” should be “to compile”.
Appendix C subheadings, pages 157-162 and the table of contents page vii: The subheadings in appendix C are identified as “9.1”, “9.2”, and “9.3”; they should instead be “C.1”, “C.2”, and “C.3” respectively.

Again, note that the errata are trivial and do not impact the fundamentals of anything in the dissertation.

This page is <http://www.dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/dissertation-errata.html>.

For other related information, see my web page on countering the trusting trust attack using diverse double-compiling (DDC). Feel free to see my home page at http://www.dwheeler.com. You may also want to look at my paper Why OSS/FS? Look at the Numbers! and my book on how to develop secure programs.