1 Jun
2014
1 Jun
'14
11:48 p.m.
On May 31, 2014 6:25 PM, "Doug McIlroy" <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
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?
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