Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
Definitions: Back Door |
Back DoorNoun1. A secret or underhand means of access (to a place or a position); "he got his job through the back door". 2. An entrance at the rear of a building. Source: WordNet 1.7.1 Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University. All rights reserved. |
| Domain | Definitions |
Computing | Back door n. [common] A hole in the security of a system deliberately left in place by designers or maintainers. The motivation for such holes is not always sinister; some operating systems, for example, come out of the box with privileged accounts intended for use by field service technicians or the vendor's maintenance programmers. Syn. trap door; may also be called a `wormhole'. See also iron box, cracker, worm, logic bomb. Historically, back doors have often lurked in systems longer than anyone expected or planned, and a few have become widely known. Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM admitted the existence of a back door in early Unix versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly clever security hack of all time. In this scheme, the C compiler contained code that would recognize when the `login' command was being recompiled and insert some code recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system whether or not an account had been created for him. Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler, you have to _use_ the compiler -- so Thompson also arranged that the compiler would _recognize when it was compiling a version of itself_, and insert into the recompiled compiler the code to insert into the recompiled `login' the code to allow Thompson entry -- and, of course, the code to recognize itself and do the whole thing again the next time around! And having done this once, he was then able to recompile the compiler from the original sources; the hack perpetuated itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and active but with no trace in the sources. The Turing lecture that suggested this truly moby hack was later published as "Reflections on Trusting Trust", "Communications of the ACM 27", 8 (August 1984), pp. 761-763 (text available at `http://www.acm.org/classics'). Ken Thompson has since confirmed that this hack was implemented and that the Trojan Horse code did appear in the login binary of a Unix Support group machine. Ken says the crocked compiler was never distributed. Your editor has heard two separate reports that suggest that the crocked login did make it out of Bell Labs, notably to BBN, and that it enabled at least one late-night login across the network by someone using the login name `kt'. Source: Jargon File. |
Slang in 1811 | BACK DOOR (USHER, or GENTLEMAN OF THE). The same. Source: 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
Synonym: Back DoorSynonym: back entrance (n). (additional references) |
Crosswords: Back Door |
| English words defined with "back door": accordion door ♦ back porch ♦ folding door ♦ latchkey ♦ Parliament hinge ♦ rear, rearward. (references) |
| Specialty definitions using "back door": iron box ♦ logic bomb ♦ PUSHER OPERATOR ♦ safety platform, SKIMMER, REVERBERATORY, STAINED GLASS ARTIST ♦ Unix conspiracy. (references) |
| Domain | Usage | |
Screenplays | See that the back door and the front door are locked while I slip into my hunchback disguise. (The Pink Panther Strikes Again; writing credit: Blake Edwards and Frank Waldman.) ! Huh?! You need to get you ass back in the garage with Nora! That's your job! Go back in there and help her ass out! Go do your job! I left the back door unlocked for your ass to go out the back and into the garage! (Halloween: Resurrection; writing credit: Debra Hill; John Carpenter) On the other hand, for me, when I begin to see flaws, chinks in the romantic armor, it's a foreshadowing--a sure sign, you know, that love's about to skip out the back door. Adios. (Northern Exposure; writing credit: Khadijah Hashim) Breaking in through the back door. (Gilmore Girls; writing credit: Povl Erik Carstensen; Sebastian Dorset) | |
Lyrics | And Mama hollered out the back door y'all remember to wipe your feet ("Ode to Billy Joe"; performing artist: Bobbie Gentry) I have to make it to Rosa's back door ("El Paso"; performing artist: Marty Robbins) | |
Clever | Low Self Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7 P.M., please use the back door. (references; author: unknown) | |
Movie/TV Titles | Use the Back Door (1970) Back Door to Hell (1964) Through the Back Door (1921) Back Door Diaries (1995) Who Came in the Back Door (1987) | |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | ||
| Domain | Title |
Books |
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Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
| Subject | Topic | Quote |
Business | Similarly, local newspapers reported that Chinese government agencies discouraged the use of Pentium III chips because they believed that a back door exists in each Pentium III chip to enable Intel or others to collect user information-a policy that appears to have had little impact. (references) | |
Source: compiled by the editor from ICON Group International, Inc.; see credits. | ||
| Speaker | Phrase(s) |
Joe Viterelli | Well, really through the back door by accident. I was friends with a director that lived in California when I moved out here. We became friendly and he kept asking me to be in, you know, things that he was directing. |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
| The following statistics estimate the number of searches per day across the major English-language search engines as identified by various trade publications. Hyperlinks lead to commercial use of the expression at Amazon.com. |
| Expression | Frequency per Day |
back door | 1,353 |
back door pool yahoo | 1,066 |
yahoo back door | 492 |
back door pogo | 432 |
yahoo game back door | 417 |
back door pool | 358 |
back door trojan | 248 |
xxx back door | 207 |
back door password | 171 |
back door spade yahoo | 134 |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
| Language | Translations for "back door"; alternative meanings/domain in parentheses. | |
Chinese | 走后門 (use back door connections to get an advantage; use influence to get what one wants), 走後門 (do something by unofficial channels, get in by the back door). (various references) | |
Danish | smaekke. (various references) | |
Dutch | achterklep. (various references) | |
Finnish | takaportti (loophole, rear entrance), takaovi (rear entrance). (various references) | |
French | hayon. (various references) | |
German | hintertür (backdoor, back-door, loophole). (various references) | |
Greek | πίσω πόρτα. (various references) | |
Hungarian | tisztességtelen út, hátsó ajtó (backdoor, tail-gate), hátrafelé (aft, astern, backward, backwards, in reverse, run of the, sternward, to get sy'). (various references) | |
Italian | piano ribaltabile. (various references) | |
Japanese Kanji | 裏背戸 , 裏木戸 , 勝手口 (kitchen door). (various references) | |
Japanese Katakana | うらきど, うらせど, かってぐち (kitchen door). (various references) | |
Manx | dorrys ny cuillagh, dorry doont. (various references) | |
Pig Latin | ackbay oorday.(various references) | |
Portuguese | porta traseira (tailgate), "hayon". (various references) | |
Romanian | uşã din spate (postern). (various references) | |
Russian | запасной выход (emergency door). (various references) | |
Spanish | secreto (arcane, backstairs, classified, covert, crypt, cryptic, dark, hidden, hugger mugger, inside, privacy, private, privy, secrecy, secret, sub rosa, under wraps, underground, unseen), puerta trasera (back-door), puerta falsa, de la puerta trasera. (various references) | |
Swedish | bakdörr (backdoor, fault, flaw, loophole, postern). (various references) | |
Turkish | gizli (arcane, blind, camera, clandestine, classified, closet, concealed, confidential, covert, cryptic, cryptical, crypto-, disguised, esoteric, furtive, hidden, hole-and-corner, hugger mugger, huggermugger, hush hush, inner, intimate, latent, masked, occult, perdu, Perdue, private, privy, quiet, restricted, sealed, secluded, secret, secretly, slinky, sneaking, sneakingly, sneaky, snug, stealthy, sub rosa, submerged, submersed, subterranean, subterraneous, surreptitious, ulterior, under cover, underarm, undercover, underground, underhand, underhanded, undisclosed, unsearchable, unseen), el altından yapılan, arka kapı (backdoor, postern, postern door, postern gate). (various references) | |
Ukranian | чорний хід (back way), та"мний (arcane, backstairs, clandestine, close, closet, colorable, colourable, covert, cryptic, esoteric, hideaway, hole-and-corner, hugger mugger, hush hush, invisible, mystic, occult, occulted, offscreen, private, secret, sly, sneaking, stealthy, subterranean, surreptitious, undercover), закулісний (back room, backstage, backstairs, behind the scenes, offscreen, offstage), запасний вихід, потайні двері. (various references) | |
Vietnamese | cửa sau. (various references) | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various translation references. | ||
Misspellings | |
"Back Door" is suggested in spellcheckers for the following: back doorr. (additional references) | |
| Source: compiled by the editor, based on several corpora (additional references). | |
Scrabble® Enable2K-Verified Anagrams | |
Direct Anagrams: backdoor. | |
| Words within the letters "a-b-c-d-k-o-o-r" | |
-1 letter: cordoba. | |
-3 letters: adobo, board, broad, brock, brood, brook, carbo, carob, cobra, croak, crook, dobra, dobro, karoo. | |
-4 letters: arco, back, bard, bark, boar, bock, book, boor, bora, brad, broo, carb, card, cark, coda, cook, cord, cork, crab, darb, dark, dock, door, dork, drab, kbar, kobo, odor, okra, orad, orca, ordo, rack, road, rock, rood, rook. | |
-5 letters: abo, ado, arb, arc, ark, bad, bar, boa, bod, boo, bra, bro, cab, cad, car, cob, cod, coo, cor, dab, dak, doc, dor, kab, koa, kob, kor, oak, oar, oca, oka, ora, orb, orc, rad, rob, roc, rod. | |
| Words containing the letters "a-b-c-d-k-o-o-r" | |
+1 letter: corkboard, roadblock. | |
+2 letters: corkboards, roadblocks. | |
+3 letters: crookbacked, roadblocked. | |
+4 letters: roadblocking. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the U.S.A and Canada by Hasbro Inc., and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons Limited of Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc. Mattel and Spear are not affiliated with Hasbro. | |
Hexadecimal (or equivalents, 770AD-1900s) (references)42 61 63 6B 44 6F 6F 72 |
| Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519; backwards) (references)
|
Binary Code (1918-1938, probably earlier) (references)01000010 01100001 01100011 01101011 00100000 01000100 01101111 01101111 01110010 |
HTML Code (1990) (references)B a c k   D o o r |
ISO 10646 (1991-1993) (references)0042 0061 0063 006B 0044 006F 006F 0072 |
Encryption (beginner's substitution cypher): (references)36676977238818184 |
| 1. Definition 2. Synonyms 3. Crosswords 4. Usage: Modern | 5. Usage: Commercial 6. Images: Slideshow 7. Quotations: Non-fiction 8. Quotations: Spoken | 9. Expressions: Internet 10. Translations: Modern 11. Derivations 12. Anagrams | 13. Orthography 14. Bibliography |
Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
