From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: a.phillip.garcia@gmail.com (A. P. Garcia) Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2014 18:48:48 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] Bugs in V6 'dcheck' In-Reply-To: <201405312324.s4VNOvFV028181@stowe.cs.dartmouth.edu> References: <201405312324.s4VNOvFV028181@stowe.cs.dartmouth.edu> Message-ID: On May 31, 2014 6:25 PM, "Doug McIlroy" wrote: > > > 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 yeah, that's not really sporting. I've always wondered about something else, though: Were the original Unix authors annoyed when they learned that some irascible young upstart named Richard Stallman was determined to make a free Unix clone? Was he a gadfly, or just some kook you decided to ignore? The fathers of Unix have been strangely silent on this topic for many years. Maybe nobody's ever asked? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: