🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <15...@utkcs2.cs.utk.edu> mo...@cs.utk.edu (Keith Moore) writes:
>Unlike the Xerox CP-V operating system which was full of holes, 
>the Burroughs MCP (Master Control Program) was said to be very secure.

I spent many happy hours hacking on languages for Burroughs Medium Systems
(B2500,B3500,B4500 and descendants) whose OS was also called MCP.  But
that one at least had a very interesting security hole. Its been over 15
years so its a little fuzzy, but the basic idea was that when you wrote a
message to the system console the message and/or the display code was 
copied or run in priviledged mode.  So we would put code in the message
instead of text; the code was just enough to put our own program in 
priviledged mode when it returned from the display call. (Paul, Grace or
?, do you remember better?)

Never did any real evil with this hook, in fact wrote a very nifty 
profiling tool that was used quite a bit.

(These were quite pleasant machines - ask me about decimal core dumps
some time.)

Mark Roberts
uunet!microsof!markro