SECURITY BUG IN INTERACTIVE UNIX SYSV386

[James Van Artsdalen]

In <1991Feb15.134715.16979 at virtech.uucp>, cpcahil at virtech.uucp
	(Conor P. Cahill) wrote:

> I agree that AT&T should take a major portion of the blame for this bug,
> especially in early releases of the OS.

I would be careful about placing blame at this point.  I have yet to
see a strong pattern develop in the postings: clearly ISC has the bug,
and it seems Esix does, but current Dell SysVr3 apparently doesn't.
There is at least one claim that current AT&T doesn't, and a few that
unspecified versions of AT&T does.

Key point: some reports say that the 387 emulation actually crashes in
systems if the u block is protected.  I don't know if the source to
the emulator is in the "source" package one receives from AT&T.
Fixing the bug might be non-trivial if it is in the emulator, and you
don't have source for the emulator.

> 1. From what you said (you tried to get ISC to fix it for the past
>    6 months) I agree with your action of posting about the problem 
>    to the net so that you could force ISC to fix the problem.

Absolutely.  Getting some programmers to fix bugs is like pulling
teeth.  People will spend hours describing why they don't want to fix
a bug when the actual fix might take fifteen minutes.

> 2. I wholeheartly DISAGREE with you posting the source code which
>    performs the security bypass. [...]  Yes a dedicated hacker could
>    have decoded your explanation and/or the binary and figure out how
>    to replicate your code, [...]

dis(1) is not terribly subtle or difficult to use.  It only takes one
person to post a dis(1) trace.

>    but the number of those is MUCH less than the number
>    of people who can now violate the security of the system using
>    your posted code.

The likelyhood that the vendor will actually fix a bug is proportional
to the number of frantic phone calls and cancelled orders they
receive.  The greater the number of people whose system is now
painfully at risk, the sooner vendors will deliver a fix.
-- 
James R. Van Artsdalen          james at bigtex.cactus.org   "Live Free or Die"
Dell Computer Co    9505 Arboretum Blvd Austin TX 78759         512-338-8789