16 Sep
2015
16 Sep
'15
12:23 p.m.
And I actually got to play with NOS ... many years after the fact ... never
thought I'd see that! What the cray-cyber.org guys are doing is remarkable.
Best,
Sean
On Wed, Sep 16, 2015 at 3:22 PM, Sean Caron <scaron at umich.edu> wrote:
Cyber systems didn't get much love from the H/P
kids back in the day :O
http://phrack.org/issues/18/5.html
That said; NOS is one of the few mainframe systems ever really discussed
in Phrack... MVS/TSO and VM/CMS you also see occasionally, but beyond that,
it seems like most of the G-files were focused on midrange systems ...
UNIX, VMS, MPE, PRIMOS, TOPS and the like. Very little discussion of many
of the mainframe vendors ...
There are a few Youtube videos where I guess people have done
presentations at Defcon or something recently, about mainframe security ...
kind of neat to watch ... of course, the z/OS they show has got all kinds
of POSIX stuff grafted onto it and ... it's fairly indistinguishable from
something older that I would recognize... like MVS 3.8J :O
Best,
Sean
On Wed, Sep 16, 2015 at 2:29 PM, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net>
wrote:
On Sep 16, 2015, at 2:10 PM, Chuck Guzis
<cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
This brings up something that's always baffled me.
Why does a user's (or worse, the entire system's) files have to be
immediately accessible to any application wanting to take a look.
Take a legacy example, SCOPE or NOS on a CDC mainframe. ...
Just remember that those older systems may well have had any number of
security issues of their own. They did benefit a lot from "security by
obscurity" as well as the fact that they weren't connected to the Internet.
I never had any incentive to look for holes in CDC operating systems, but
I still remember a simple hole I found in OS/360, about a month after I
first wrote a program for that OS. It allowed anyone to run supervisor
mode code with a couple dozen lines of assembler source code. I found it on
OS/PCP 19.6, but I noticed in graduate school that it still worked on the
university's 370 running OS/MVS 21.7.
(The magic? Use the OS service to give a symbolic name to a location in
your code, with a well chosen name, then give that name as the name of the
"start I/O appendage" in an EXCP style I/O request.)
paul