Aucbcory.220 net.followup utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ARPAVAX:CAD:ESVAX:Cory:cc-treas Mon Mar 8 00:45:28 1982 Terminal Security Problem I am a member of the Berkeley Division Academic Senate Committee on Computing. We make Computing policy for the Berkeley Campus of the University of California. The thrust of the problem has been described accurately in Human-nets (as opposed to the news media) as involving block send mode commands on intelligent terminals. I personally heard about it last spring. The Committee was informed in October, and we got the introduction to a paper by Donn Parker (and some other notable whose name escapes me at the moment) at the same time. InfoWorld, a micro newspaper, which, no doubt, some of you read, got wind of it and put it in their January issue. It has gone wild in the media since then. The L.A. Times article, which someone typed in and sent over USENET (Unix UUCP news to the ARPAnauts), is the worst. Let me emphasize that none of our systems have been breached in the manner described. The Committee has discussed a number of measures that we can take to remove the threat, and the best one is simply to not buy the terminals with said feature. It is the opinion of the Committee that there is no good reason for the block send command to exist as a sequence that the Host computer can send. (If someone does have a good explaination, I'd love to hear it!) It would be rather hard to modify the opsys to exclude the lead-in characters from terminal-to-terminal communication for ALL terminals. Hazeltines use ~, adm3a's use ESC. I've seen wierder ones too. Essentially you'd have to outlaw the whole ASCII (or EBCDIC) character set to fix things. And it still would be possible for someone to mail you a letter with such things in it. So it is really up to the terminal manufacturers to remedy the problem. One thing that no one has mentioned yet is terminals with programmable keys (i.e. keys that may be programmed by the user to send an arbitrary sequence of characters). These terminals pose the same threat. I can program such a terminal with all kinds of bombs, and wait for some unsuspecting user to press one of them. Or, if the terminal is so equipped, I can send it a code remotely to tell it to retransmit it's programmable keys. I think the televideo 950 is one such. Sorry for the long letter, but I had to get this off my chest. If anyone has any questions, please mail to me directly. Erik E. Fair Representative to the Academic Senate Committee on Computing Computer Science Undergraduate Association Treasurer Cory.cc-treas@Berkeley (ARPA) ucbvax!ucbcory!cc-treas (UUCP) ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.