From: doug@cs.dartmouth.edu (Doug McIlroy)
Subject: [TUHS] Bugs in V6 'dcheck'
Date: Sat, 31 May 2014 19:24:57 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <201405312324.s4VNOvFV028181@stowe.cs.dartmouth.edu> (raw)
> Ken and Dennis and the other guys behind
> the earliest UNIX code were smart guys and good programmers,
> but they were far from perfect; and back in those days we
> were all a lot sloppier.
The observation that exploits may be able to parlay
mundane bugs into security holes was not a commonplace
back then--even in the Unix room. So input buffers were
often made "bigger than ever will be needed" and left
that way on the understanding that crashes are tolerable
on outlandish data. In an idle moment one day, Dennis fed
a huge line of input to most everything in /bin. To the
surprise of nobody, including Dennis, lots of programs
crashed. We WERE surprised a few years later, when a journal
published this fact as a research result. Does anybody
remember who published that deep new insight and/or where?
Doug
next reply other threads:[~2014-05-31 23:24 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 25+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2014-05-31 23:24 Doug McIlroy [this message]
2014-06-01 0:17 ` Kevin Schoedel
2014-06-01 22:54 ` scj
2014-06-01 23:48 ` A. P. Garcia
2014-06-02 1:11 ` Ronald Natalie
2014-06-02 2:10 ` A. P. Garcia
2014-06-03 16:38 ` Nelson H. F. Beebe
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2014-06-03 17:33 Nelson H. F. Beebe
2014-06-02 3:34 Noel Chiappa
2014-06-02 4:05 ` Mary Ann Horton
2014-06-02 6:12 ` arnold
2014-06-03 12:11 ` emanuel stiebler
2014-06-02 3:18 Noel Chiappa
2014-06-02 2:14 Michael Spacefalcon
2014-06-02 2:51 ` John Cowan
2014-05-31 15:55 Noel Chiappa
2014-05-31 16:18 ` Ron Natalie
2014-05-31 14:19 Noel Chiappa
2014-05-31 13:30 Norman Wilson
2014-05-31 16:03 ` John Cowan
[not found] ` <20140531161620.GL28034@mcvoy.com>
2014-05-31 17:16 ` John Cowan
2014-05-31 13:15 Noel Chiappa
2014-05-31 13:23 ` Ronald Natalie
2014-05-31 18:58 ` Tim Newsham
2014-05-31 19:48 ` Clem Cole
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