Comment by pweezy

It’s not the same thing, but brings to mind Ken Thomason’s famous “Reflections on Trusting Trust” [0] from 1984.

That describes a concept, over several stages, where a compiler can be made to change the behavior of programs it compiles in a difficult-to-find way.

[0]: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...