| ▲ | not2b 2 days ago | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Well, sort of. RTM underestimated the effect of exponential growth, and thought that he would in effect have an account on all of the connected systems, without permission. He evidently didn't intend to use this power for evil, just to see if it could be done. He did do us all a service; people back then didn't seem to realize that buffer overflows were a security risk. The model people had then, including my old boss at one of my first jobs in the early 80s, is that if you fed a program invalid input and it crashed, this was your fault because the program had a specification or documentation and you didn't comply with it. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | tptacek 2 days ago | parent [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Interestingly, it took another 7 years for stack overflows to be taken seriously, despite a fairly complete proof of concept widely written about. For years, pretty much everybody slept on buffer overflows of all sorts; if you found an IFS expansion bug in an SUID, you'd only talk about it on hushed private mailing lists with vendor security contacts, but nobody gave a shit about overflows. It was Thomas Lopatic and 8lgm that really lit a fire under this (though likely they were inspired by Morris' work). Lopatic wrote the first public modern stack overflow exploit, for HPUX NCSA httpd, in 1995. Later that year, 8lgm teased (but didn't publish --- which was a big departure for them) a remote stack overflow in Sendmail 8.6.12 (it's important to understand what a big deal Sendmail vectors were at the time). That 8lgm tease was what set Dave Goldsmith, Elias Levy, San Mehat, and Pieter Zatko (and presumably a bunch of other people I just don't know) off POC'ing the first wave of public stack overflow vulnerabilities. In the 9-18 months surrounding that work, you could look at basically any piece of privileged code, be it a remote service or an SUID binary or a kernel driver, and instantly spot overflows. It was the popularization with model exploits and articles like "Smashing The Stack" that really raised the alarm people took seriously. That 7 year gap is really wild when you think about it, because during that time period, during which people jealously guarded fairly dumb bugs, like an errant pipe filter input to the calendar manager service that run by default on SunOS shelling out to commands, you could have owned up literally any system on the Internet, so prevalent were the bugs. And people blew them off! I wrote a thread about this on Twitter back in the day, and Neil Woods from 8lgm responded... with the 8.6.12 exploit! | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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