🚀 go-pugleaf

>From article <84...@ttidca.TTI.COM>, by pa...@ttidca.TTI.COM (Paul Blumstein):
> In the early '80s, Prime Computer came out with their new Operating System
> (Primos) Release 18 (or was it 20?).  Anyway, one of the new features of
> this release was that it had additional security features.  It was
> previewed at the Prime Users Group (PUG) meeting in Long Beach, CA where
> the Prime executives proudly boasted that it was impossible to break
> security.
> 
> After about 20 minutes of hacking away at a terminal, a high school student
> attending the meeting, printed off a list of everyone's passwords.  The
> red-faced execs announced that the OS will be released after this newly-
> found security bug is fixed.
> 
> =============================================================================
> Paul Blumstein       | "The judicial system is very fast now that they've gotten
> Citicorp/TTI         | rid of the lawyers" - Back to the Future 2 (in 2015 AD)
> Santa Monica, CA     +-------------------------------------------------------
> {philabs,csun,psivax}!ttidca!paulb  or  pa...@ttidca.TTI.COM
> DISCLAIMER: Everything & everyone is hereby disclaimed!

Way back when I was in high school, (A certain private school in NJ)
aquired a new Prime and about 40 terminals.  The system administrater
was a little paranoid but thought the security to be unbreachable and
consequently did not moniter us Fortran students very well.  We were
denied access to change access to our directories and felt that this 
most unfair.  To create a "private" file system for myself and my cadre
all I needed to do was create a subdirectory under the mail directory
with our names and a lot of bogus names given privilages.  Under that
we created a whole separate file system.  My opinion is that PrimeOs
had so many security holes that a two-year old could break security.

Michael de Mare				dem...@clutx.clarkson.edu
"Those who followeth me shall walketh off cliffs."

The big problem with old versions of Primos (or pr1mos, as the manuals
said) was that lots of programs relied on embedded passwords in
executables to access protected directories.  Editing, much less
disassembling, a binary would give lots of programs away.   Then when
rev 20 came out (I think it was 20... maybe 19) with user accessible
dynamic libraries, whole new worlds of hacking opened up.  By searching
for the DYNT entries in the binary and replacing them with your own you
could wreak havoc.  One systems programmer I knew (Hi Franz!) went to
incredible lengths to hide the names of the DYNTs... even to the extent
of building call frames by hand and then branching to them (shudder).

-- 
Scott Schwartz		<schw...@shire.cs.psu.edu>
"More mips; cheaper mips; never too many." -- John Mashey