Early UNIX Contributor Robert Morris Dead at 78 90
dtmos writes "Robert Morris, a major contributor to the Unix password and security features while at Bell Labs, has passed at the age of 78. His interesting life was made even more interesting by his son, Robert Tappan Morris, who invented the computer worm."
Re:command line death (Score:2, Interesting)
God@heaven /usr/earth/RobertTappanMorris sudo mv soul.bin /heaven
Except he was an atheist.
Stoll's "Cuckoo's Egg" has some great anecdotes (Score:5, Interesting)
Clifford Stoll, who tracked a cracker backwards from the government science-lab networks being snooped on, eventually to eastern Europe, told a few great RTM stories in his memoir of it, "The Cuckoo's Egg". Stoll accepted an invitation to lecture various government and intelligence officials on his search to that point, and had one of those deals where he had to wait outside the room while other presenters spoke, then ushered out afterwards because it was all reflexively classified.
Stoll, an astronomer by trade who studied temperatures on Jupiter and became a sysadmin when his grants failed, got to the end of his presentation on ping timing and tracing and getting foreign police to check the telephone origin of a modem connection to an IP, to be asked several questions. The one from Morris, sprawled in the front row, was about adiabatic heating in Jupiter's atmosphere. Stoll switched mental tracks with some effort and answered as CIA types and military officers craned their necks around in confusion.
Later on, when the RTM-Jr. worm was wreaking havoc on the 1987 Internet, Stoll called Morris Sr. to get his take on it. A subdued and monosyllabic Morris answered that he knew about the problem and believed he could get to the bottom of it, but couldn't talk now.
memory of rhm (Score:5, Interesting)
Everyone at Bell Labs was sharp, but he was a an especially talented special expert on loan. Anyway, I was doing random UNIX hacking and I was also the sysadm for a couple of PDP-11s that we all timeshared for our UNIX hacking. This is a story that I've kept secret for 30 years.
This all was before the days of viruses, and the ARPANET existed, but not at Bell Labs. Occasionally hackers would break into other people's systems, usually just for fun.
We made heavy use of modems to send data all around (uucp, usenet, remote login, etc), so there was some concern about system intrusion, and as I said, this was a Navy contract (with Secret and Top Secret elements). We had lots of security in the buildings and labs (big locks, guards, rs232 wires in secured tubes, etc.). We had some secret/secured UNIX systems and some not.
On a whim, I had decided to install a little security hack on a couple of my non-secure UNIX systems - a nightly cron job that did a "find / -perm 04000 -uid 0 -ls" or whatever it was, to find all the suid root programs on the system, and write the list to a log file, and to diff yesterday's and today's, and make sure nothing changed. One Saturday morning, I logged into my system from home (as a sysadm, I had a "foreign exchange" phone in my bedroom that acted like the extension that was sitting in my office at work). I see an email from cron that said that
I was shocked, I called my boss and I started looking around the system to see what I could find (I was the admin and had root access). I found some suspicious files in Bob Morris's $HOME. He had some files encrypted with UNIX crypt, and one was exactly the size of the login.c source, and one was a bit bigger. I knew that UNIX crypt encoded files on a byte-for-byte basis, so this was very strange, but I didn't know how to crack crypt.
I had friends in BTL research, and I called one and they said to call Jim Reeds (I think) because he was a main BTL crypto guy, so I did. BTL was pretty big (at least 30k engineers) and the pure research folks (like Reeds, and Morris for that matter) were in an ivory tower, and didn't necessarily listen whenever Bell Labs development folks called them, especially 20-year-old kids like me. So I call Reeds and I tell him my story. I'm in this BTL department, we're doing a contract with the Navy, it looks like someone hacked my
In a few hours, he'd decoded the files. I guess if you already have a crypt-cracker, it would be especially easy if you knew that one file was an existing login.c and the other was probably a small hack to it. So Bob had hacked
Bell Labs had many layers of management, and occasionally funny business would occur and the supervisors, department heads, directors, vps, etc would get together to pow-wow about what to do, and I think this was one of those cases. In the end, it resolved pretty quietly, and I don't know what the upshot was, but Bob stayed on our project and I think it was "no harm, no foul." I don't think I ever asked him "what the hell were you thinking?"
Wh
Re:Stoll's "Cuckoo's Egg" has some great anecdotes (Score:4, Interesting)
In one of those odd connections of fate, I remember reading The Cuckoo's Egg, and having an email conversation with Cliff Stoll about the generating function that Robert Morris discussed with him at the NSA..... and Cliff's response of "hot diggity!" when I managed to work it out. And then a few years later I wound up as a fellow grad student of RTM, which resulted in meeting RHM and hearing some fascinating stories, that the times article refers to as "still classified" about his work in the first gulf war. Indeed the usual /. bad jokes in this thread are even more troll than usual.
jon
p.s. hi cliff