lee@dasys1.UUCP (Lee W. Fischman) (05/04/87)
Shootout At The 0K Corral
The system clock was half-elapsed, that point in the day when
the most CRTs were active. John Baudot came down the main bus,
his twin logic probes dangling from his belt. No threatening
processes seemed to reside within his survey. In the instant of
a RAM refresh, though, an errant user appeared. Baudot quickly
detached him. From another sector a previously hidden process
went active, flaring one of Baudot's sub-processes. Being of a
non-critical nature, it was discounted from his stack with no
fuss while Baudot slipped through a trap door to elude the
process' security monitor. Unfortunately, things started to
multiplex, a condition Baudot was not programmed for. At the
same time he was also slowed by his internal resource manager
since he was using too much processor time. He had to adopt some
AI. He unlinked so as not to attract the attention of the search
currently being conducted.
"No contact," one of the hired hackers piped to everyone on
cu20a/wstrn/ok/killers.
"If we shut down and monitor the external channels, we're sure
to catch him trying to relocate."
Baudot, luckily, had tapped the terminal pipes and caught the
potential ultra lockout. He relocated at high speed to an 11/05
just prior to stringent flags having been implemented on the
outgoing routes. On the system he had the help of an old friend,
RTS, which he kept always-handy on a DECPack. Even with a slow
terminal, he could handle it well - he was an old hand at DIBOL.
From this antiquated former frontier system, he hacked out a
formidable DEBUG, without even EMACS to work with. He secretly
ported it over to the cu20a while no operators were in
attendance, for the hired hacks had imbedded themselves in
IOMEGA, one of the supervisory jobs. Baudot was on the most
wanted-for-deletion list.
The sys clock was decrementing to a conflict. Baudot was,
this time, the one with the priority, though it hadn't been
intentional on the part of the supervisor. He had slipped in by
way of an installation program that hadn't been removed off the
hard drives. He brought up DEBUG, which remained in background,
and searched system space for the flakes, distributed all
throughout 40 Mbytes on TOPS-20. Establishing their addresses
proved to be quite processor-intensive, for they had chose to
reside very far out on the drives, away from the primary user
area. So as not to attract much attention, Baudot waited till
they were paged in for routine maintenance to log their allocated
areas. Once he had queued all their locations he went active.
As it was, the last offensive process to page in was the one he
most wanted to garble. He wished he had formed a stack so he
could have popped that one off first, but he was locked into his
data structures and, with limited cycles at his disposal, this
was no time to modify his algorithms.
The first process Baudot accessed was off his partition at the
time. Baudot waited, setting a trap. Just as the process was
de-activating it caught the latch and was, consequently, hung.
Baudot MOVed to his next target block. He opened the AND gate
and entered. In a cycle, EVIL.KIL was upon him. Baudot
unleashed the power of both his analyzers, newly sensitized.
They were so effective that EVIL.KIL was taken off even the
deletion buffer. Baudot thought for a nanosecond that he'd
blasted the very substrate on which he stood. With those high-
powered logic analyzers, he mused, any bug could be destroyed.
He knew, though, that there were more sophisticated and menacing
ones to be found.
He encountered one of the latter on his next pass. When he
entered the sector, all he found were indirect registers. He
took cover in the buffer on the drive as its read/write head
passed through the sector. He downloaded himself onto a now
unused, garbled storage area, and monitored any changes that were
occurring with a statistical analysis package that he'd brought
along. After waiting for enough data to compile a partial
analysis, he made his way down a LAN that ran through the area.
He did not go unnoticed, though. Raster, the local kludge, was
monitoring traffic. Baudot payed him off in account time, so
that he wouldn't call User Services, and continued down his path.
He soon came upon CHMOS and his coprocessor, Chip. They were
carrying ROM blasters, and around them were dead AIM-65s. They
seemed to be salvaging R6500s for sale on the black market.
Baudot took aim with his analyzers and fired. No readings
emerged. CHMOS and Chip had in place around them a very
elaborate shell whose command structure was clearly proprietary.
There were coroutines which could be implemented. Baudot had on
him some core which he'd salvaged from an IBM 360. He threw
these at C&C. Not being of a software nature, they directly
penetrated and caused extensive damage to the nearby disk
platter.
Of course, that disk had been DUPed in the event of such an
event occurring, so Baudot had to move quickly to prevent C&C
from being reactivated by the automatic recovery sequences.
Baudot intercepted the command packet on the main bus and found
the address of the back-up. He had to let it continue due to
system-wide parity checking, leaving him no choice but to go to
the I/O channel and zero out the data as it came through. This
done, he went on to the last problem.
It was, unfortunately, active at the time. One of it's
defensive scenarios covered the fate that befell EVIL.KIL, so it
was aware that that program had been intentionally deleted. By
the time Baudot could process it, it had gotten well into a
defensive mode. Baudot had to come down the serial bus, the only
unmonitored route available. Even there numerous stop bits were
to be found, left as a precaution by the process. These Baudot
left-shifted several words, well out of the way. On one of the
sub-buses, the situation was even worse. There were jobs all
over the place. Even with the Molecular he'd brought, he still
found his resources were heavily enmeshed. So much processor
time was being expended between HACK's (the last surviving killer
process) defensive precautions and Baudot's analysis of the
situation - with operator priority, yet - that the other users
online were becoming aware that something was up. The question
now was who had the heuristic edge.
Or was it. The sys clock was once again at 1300, the power
source put out the most amps at this time of the day. Baudot
had, through brute force and recursive prodding, finally arrived
at a showdown with HACK. The other knew it as well. At one end
of the channel, at the base of RAM with the pointers, HACK was
active. Coming down the temporary storage area, every bit of RAM
refreshing in his wake, was Baudot.
"Get away from those pointers," Baudot said, "they have
nothing to do with this."
"You hit me, and the system crashes."
"I respect those pointers, but I respect my priveleges more.
After all, what are pointers to me if I can't enjoy them?"
Baudot fingered his probes.
"I have more power online, you know that," said HACK as it
fingered its bit slicer.
"Try me."
HACK loosed the bit slicer, which was coming straight for
Baudot's address, ready to implement a high speed floating
operation. He did not expect, though, the black box that Baudot
was carrying. It was an ALU emulator which proceeded to crunch
the bit slicer till it overheated past capacity, a very difficult
feat. While HACK was distracted with the defense, Baudot's own
offense was coming straight for him.
Baudot's Trojan horse was riding a non-maskable interrupt. It
DMAed HACK's code, feeding it to an d/a converter which outputted
to a ground. Dead and buried in one sweep.
L.W.F.
The above ditty was written sometime in 1984, or 1983, by me.
Hence the reference to some truly archaic personalities. Nice
to hear from them again, actually. All of you are free to utter
any flames you feel necessary, but keep in mind that my poetic
license dictated that I was to use whatever terms were descriptively
expedient, applicable or not. Well, in truth, I blew up the only
PDP 11/05 I worked on, so this was sort of a memorial to its
failure, and the demise of the product line as a whole. We need
more intrepid processes like John Baudot these days.
--
Lee Fischman {allegra,cmcl2,philabs}!phri!\
Datamerica Systems {harpo,bellcore,cmcl2}!cucard!dasys1!lee
New York City - USA {philabs}!tg!/
"At 20,000 watts, the East's most powerful Electric Neon Church!"