Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!convex!killer!texbell!bellcore!clyde!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: The worm/virus was a good thing
Message-ID: <2266@looking.UUCP>
Date: 6 Nov 88 02:33:08 GMT
References: <16496@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 21

Let's face it, something like this had to happen on internet someday.
That much complex software with deliberately limited security?  Of
course it would, and will again.

This virus displayed one of the nastiest holes you can have in a system.
Root access to every vax/sun with a debug-enabled sendmail program.
Very nasty things could have been done.

Everybody has learned a lesson cheap.  There will be more lessons in
the future, in other new ways, but this lesson will help people who write
future code.


While everybody knows that the programs that do network communication,
like sendmail, should be extra secure, a program that complex is bound
to have a hole here or there.   Perhaps the lesson is that programs that
do accept input from the outside world must *NOT* run as root, or must
do their root stuff in an independent, simpler, security checked process.
(Perhaps the multics boys were right?)
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd.  --  Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473