Ken Thompson's classic trusting-trust attack, where a compromised compiler injects backdoors into compiled programs and perpetuates itself, has long been considered unique to compilers. This paper demonstrates that the attack is not limited to compilers. The authors construct a complete trusting-trust attack using GNU strip, a common build utility that neither inspects nor generates source code, relying solely on manipulations of finished ELF binaries.

In the bootstrap process of the Nix OS Linux distribution, a single tampered strip binary in the seed implants a payload that propagates through successive strip generations and survives into the final standard environment, even after the original seed is removed from the dependency closure. Testing on a real nixpkgs revision shows the attack successfully builds a full graphical installer without errors and backdoors nearly every produced binary, enabling arbitrary malicious actions in the subverted packages. This finding expands the scope of trusting-trust attacks beyond compilers, highlighting a broader security risk in software supply chains.