Doug is quite right that we were much more relaxed about security then. THe academic world was very much inspired at the time by the idea that one could prove programs correct using mathematics. I remember having some very spirited arguments on this topic with some academics. My argument was roughly "Proving programs is stupid. Look at Unix. It's insanely useful, but most programs can't be proved correct because they aren't!". Buffer overflow was one of the bugs I had in mind. It was embarrassing in later years to read about all the hackers exploiting these bugs. In our defence, with only <= 64KB for programs and data and the slow machines of the day, dynamic allocation and subscript checking were often impractical... Steve

Some UPSTART named RMS in his whole odipherous spledor couldn't even spell LINUX. If you read his earlier manifesto rants he hated UNIX with a passion. Holding out the TOPS operating systems as the be-all and end-all of user interface. Despite his disingenous propaganda, he didn't invent LINUX (or any other UNIX clone). RMS didn't even enter onto the UNIX scene until after he had been burned by LMI/Symbolics/MIT over contributions he made to the Lisp Machine that he assumed would always be freely available. I was a rather late comer to UNIX, having not started on it until 1977, RMS wasn't anywhere around until over a decade later. I was happy that Ken and Dennis and the folks were coming up with the design pattern and not worrying about every single bug in the system. This was RESEARCH. Those of us in the direct trenches at the places that got UNIX under the "scrap metal" provisions got to make our own contribution by increasing robustness and performance as well as extended the underlying paradigm.

Doug McIlroy &lt;doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu&gt; wrote on Sat, 31 May 2014 19:24:57 -0400: I suspect that two relevant papers that Doug is recalling are these (I routinely use their fuzz-test code on my own software): @String{j-CACM = "Communications of the ACM"} @Article{Miller:1990:ESR, author = "Barton P. Miller and Lars Fredriksen and Bryan So", title = "An empirical study of the reliability of {UNIX} utilities", journal = j-CACM, volume = "33", number = "12", pages = "32--44", month = dec, year = "1990", CODEN = "CACMA2", ISSN = "0001-0782 (print), 1557-7317 (electronic)", ISSN-L = "0001-0782", bibdate = "Wed Sep 25 09:24:48 2002", bibsource = "ftp://ftp.ira.uka.de/pub/bibliography/Misc/IMMD_IV.bib; http://www.acm.org/pubs/toc/; http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/cacm1990.bib", note = "This is a fascinating paper on what happens when random input streams are fed into important UNIX utilities on several commercial UNIX systems. In some cases, the tests were able to crash the entire operating system. In 1995, a (sadly, unpublished) followup study showed that many of the failures diagnosed in 1990 still had not been repaired in the commercial systems, and that the GNU implementations were generally more robust. Both 1990 and 1995 papers, and the fuzz-generating software, are available at the authors' FTP site at \path|ftp://grilled.cs.wisc.edu/technical_papers/fuzz.ps| and \path|ftp://grilled.cs.wisc.edu/technical_papers/fuzz-revisited.ps|.", URL = "ftp://grilled.cs.wisc.edu/technical_papers/fuzz-revisited.ps; ftp://grilled.cs.wisc.edu/technical_papers/fuzz.ps; http://www.acm.org/pubs/toc/Abstracts/0001-0782/96279.html", acknowledgement = ack-nhfb, journal-URL = "http://portal.acm.org/browse_dl.cfm?idx=J79", keywords = "design; reliability; security", note2 = "[25-Sep-2002]: The fuzz software archive has been moved to \path|ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/pub/paradyn/fuzz/|, and the technical reports to \path|ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/pub/paradyn/technical_papers/fuzz*|.", subject = "{\bf D.4.5}: Software, OPERATING SYSTEMS, Reliability. {\bf D.4.0}: Software, OPERATING SYSTEMS, General, UNIX. {\bf D.4.9}: Software, OPERATING SYSTEMS, Systems Programs and Utilities. {\bf D.2.5}: Software, SOFTWARE ENGINEERING, Testing and Debugging.", } @String{j-OPER-SYS-REV = "Operating Systems Review"} @Article{Miller:2007:ESR, author = "Barton P. Miller and Gregory Cooksey and Fredrick Moore", title = "An empirical study of the robustness of {MacOS} applications using random testing", journal = j-OPER-SYS-REV, volume = "41", number = "1", pages = "78--86", month = jan, year = "2007", CODEN = "OSRED8", DOI = "http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1228291.1228308", ISSN = "0163-5980 (print), 1943-586X (electronic)", ISSN-L = "0163-5980", bibdate = "Fri Jun 20 17:15:27 MDT 2008", bibsource = "http://portal.acm.org/; http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/opersysrev.bib", abstract = "We report on the fourth in a series of studies on the reliability of application programs in the face of random input. Over the previous 15 years, we have studied the reliability of UNIX command line and X-Window based (GUI) applications and Windows applications. In this study, we apply our fuzz testing techniques to applications running on the Mac OS X operating system. We continue to use a simple, or even simplistic technique: unstructured black-box random testing, considering a failure to be a crash or hang. As in the previous three studies, the technique is crude but seems to be effective in locating bugs in real programs. We tested the reliability of 135 command-line UNIX utilities and thirty graphical applications on Mac OS X by feeding random input to each. We report on application failures --- crashes (dumps core) or hangs (loops indefinitely) --- and, where source code is available, we identify the causes of these failures and categorize them. Our testing crashed only 7\% of the command-line utilities, a considerably lower rate of failure than observed in almost all cases of previous studies. We found the GUI-based applications to be less reliable: of the thirty that we tested, only eight did not crash or hang. Twenty others crashed, and two hung. These GUI results were noticeably worse than either of the previous Windows (Win32) or UNIX (X-Windows) studies.", acknowledgement = ack-nhfb, fjournal = "ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review", journal-URL = "http://portal.acm.org/browse_dl.cfm?idx=J597", keywords = "fuzz; random testing", } ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------