The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to bit.listserv.vmesa-l,alt.folklore.computers as well.
rschuh wrote: > > Does anyone know of a documented case of VM being penetrated by hackers? > long ago, I briefly succombed once. The future system project was in full swing ... lots of past posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#futuresys all the documentation was supposed to be super secret and required need-to-know ... and so it was all being done as softcopy under vm370. they had instituted all sorts of additional security processes. I had been somewhat panning FS project by comparing what they were doing to a cult film that had been playing continuously for several yrs down in central sq (and making references to the inmates being in charge of the institution). Anyway ... somebody up'ed the ante by making claims that all the vm370 security procedures were such that even if I was physically in the machine room, I wouldn't be able to access the documents. So in a moment of weakness, I said that it would take less than five minutes ... I went to the operators console and spent most of the time disabling connectivity to the machine (to anything outside the machine room) ... then I flipped a bit in real storage ... and had access to everything. So they then wanted to know what kind of countermeasures to that attack would I use (i.e. standard procedure to alternate between attacking and defending). My comment was to remove all the front panel controls to a lockable interface (say keyboard handled by some sort of service processor requiring password) and/or encrypt all the information (i.e. DES hadn't been invented yet ... although the person responsible for DES was student down at Harvard at the time) for some topic drift ... recent somewhat related thread http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#14 when was MMU virtualization first considered practical? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#15 when was MMU virtualization first considered practical? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#16 when was MMU virtualization first considered practical? basically the cp67 service at the science center http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech including providing access to some number of students and others from various educational institutions in the boston area ... while at the same time, performing some amount of activity involving extremely sensitive corporate information. In the above reference thread ... it was the existance of virtual memory for 370 ... before the announcement that there would be 370 virtual memory. Another scenario involved the most sensitve corporate data about customers and business operation. The science center had ported apl\360 to CMS for cms\apl. One of the things this allowed was workspace sizes up to the size of the cms virtual machine (while typical apl\360 workspace sizes was 16kbytes or sometimes 32kbytes). In that time-frame, APL was frequently used for business modeling and other things that currently commingly use spreadsheets. Drastically increasing the APL workspace size allowed for business people in corporate hdqtrs to run their applications against large amounts of real data (so remote 2741 terminal access was provided to armonk ... and they set up tapes containing extremely sensitive customer and business data). In this time frame, there was one incident of a MIT student doing a looping channel program as a denial of service attack. for other drift ... there was the use mentioned by these guys ... something that I didn't learn about until much later http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/list-archive/0409/8362.cfm misc. past posts about security issues raised by allowing access to non-employees and students from various institutions in the Boston area ... while at the same time providing services involving some of the highest sensitive corporate information. http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#7 IBM S/360 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#33 why is there an "@" key? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000g.html#4 virtualizable 360, was TSS ancient history http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#44 Withdrawal Announcement 901-218 - No More 'small machines' http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002h.html#50 crossreferenced program code listings http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002h.html#60 Java, C++ (was Re: Is HTML dead?) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002i.html#62 subjective Q. - what's the most secure OS? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002p.html#37 Newbie: Two quesions about mainframes http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#47 myths about Multics http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003b.html#0 Disk drives as commodities. Was Re: Yamhill http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#66 History of project maintenance tools -- what and when? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003f.html#1 History of project maintenance tools -- what and when? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003g.html#5 Any DEC 340 Display System Doco ? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003g.html#18 Multiple layers of virtual address translation http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003g.html#29 Lisp Machines http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#31 determining memory size http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004c.html#7 IBM operating systems http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004e.html#36 NSF interest in Multics security http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004p.html#50 IBM 3614 and 3624 ATM's http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005b.html#12 [Lit.] Buffer overruns http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005b.html#45 [Lit.] Buffer overruns http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005d.html#58 Virtual Machine Hardware http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#63 Moving assembler programs above the line http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005g.html#57 Security via hardware? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005h.html#18 Exceptions at basic block boundaries http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005o.html#34 Not enough parallelism in programming http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005o.html#46 Article: The True Value of Mainframe Security http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#20 address space http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#27 What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS ? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#38 Is VIO mandatory? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006f.html#5 3380-3390 Conversion - DISAPPOINTMENT http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006h.html#14 Security http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#21 Virtual Virtualizers http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#26 Mainframe Limericks http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#2 The System/360 Model 20 Wasn't As Bad As All That http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#19 Source maintenance was Re: SEQUENCE NUMBERS http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#3 IBM sues maker of Intel-based Mainframe clones http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#19 The Future of CPUs: What's After Multi-Core? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#31 Wylbur and Paging
