on trusting trust and the shadows on the wall of the cave

Reading  the excellent Your Computer Is On Fire recently, and there's a great chapter revisiting Ken Thompson's rightly famous Turing Award Speech about trusting trust. The chapter also discusses the Wheeler solution to the problem --

in a nutshell,  when you use a tool chain for building a computing system, you depend on the tool builders. So an application must be compiled (or interpreted) and runs on an operating system, which runs on hardware which may be networked and so on - it is "turtles all the way down".  The Thompson "hack" takes advantage of two things - bootstrapping compilers and quotation, to build systems that build in trapdoors at build time, but in a way that is not visible to simple inspection of the compiler tools (without going back in time to before the hack and before the bootstrap - i.e. introduces a cost of effectively rebuilding your tools ab initio every time to avoid the trapdoor re-insertion two step dance. The Wheeler solution is to find some tools from elsewhere as well and compile your system with those too and compare the results. An alternative is to use trustworthy computing so that the privileges don't increase as you go down the stack, and you can check the integrity of the tools&die as well as apps - but now with attestation, or with multiple toolchains, we have a chain or even a web of trust rather than a stack of trust. We may need a web (or even a blockchain) because we want to mitigate collusion (between key signing agents or between different tool builders, or, obviously both) - 

Isn't life complicated...?