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Chargen: Good Intentions on the Old-Timey Internet

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Re: Chargen: Good Intentions on the Old-Timey Internet

#11

Post by jachee »

zokier wrote: post #7
dhosek wrote: post #3

Some of those good intentions got tested early enough. There was an instance of a student at Harvey Mudd in the 80s who set up mail forwarding from his Unix account to his VMS account and forwarding from his VMS account to his Unix account. The first e-mail that came in eventually brought both systems to their knees. And the trust remained pretty unbroken regardless of this. Into the 90s, I could telnet easily enough…

> Into the 90s, I could telnet easily enough between corporate and university systems, no VPN needed (although a quick google reveals, no VPN invented either). Apparently IPsec, SSH, and SSL all appeared in 1995, as did SHA1 and 3DES, must have been quite a year for crypto. But those took time to catch on, especially as the systems were far more fragmented then than today. It took five years more to get rid of the si…

I did my junior (high-school) year English research paper on RSA and public key encryption that year (1995). I recall using a phrase along the lines of "This may lead to more trust of The Information Superhighway, and enable its use as a commercial trade center."

Re: Chargen: Good Intentions on the Old-Timey Internet

#12

Post by dhosek »

icedchai wrote: post #6
dhosek wrote: post #3

Some of those good intentions got tested early enough. There was an instance of a student at Harvey Mudd in the 80s who set up mail forwarding from his Unix account to his VMS account and forwarding from his VMS account to his Unix account. The first e-mail that came in eventually brought both systems to their knees. And the trust remained pretty unbroken regardless of this. Into the 90s, I could telnet easily enough…

In the 90's I had my home network completely exposed to the public. Fully routable IP's. No firewall. It was a different world then.

I had two machines at home in those days, a Win2k machine and a Mac. Both were locked down against remote logins by default. When my parents first got broadband, their Windows 95 machine was not locked by default and some courteous hacker updated startup.bat to alert them of the vulnerability.

Re: Chargen: Good Intentions on the Old-Timey Internet

#13

Post by gruturo »

schoen wrote: post #4

Some of the other low TCP ports that used to have public debugging-oriented services: echo 7/tcp echo 7/udp This one would echo back what you sent it, kind of like running cat, except on another computer across the Internet. discard 9/tcp sink null discard 9/udp sink null This one would discard what you sent it, kind of like running cat >/dev/null, except on another computer across the Internet. systat 11/tcp users T…

Port numbers used to be all odd (server side) due to a limitation in TCP’s predecessor. Sockets used to be unidirectional so you’d need a pair for two-way communication.

It was discussed here on HN not too long ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21350246

Re: Chargen: Good Intentions on the Old-Timey Internet

#17

Post by _wldu »

dhosek wrote: post #3

Some of those good intentions got tested early enough. There was an instance of a student at Harvey Mudd in the 80s who set up mail forwarding from his Unix account to his VMS account and forwarding from his VMS account to his Unix account. The first e-mail that came in eventually brought both systems to their knees. And the trust remained pretty unbroken regardless of this. Into the 90s, I could telnet easily enough…

Some research edus in the US still run open networks with globally routed IPs on every node and no edge firewalls. While they are a dying breed, they still exist.

Re: Chargen: Good Intentions on the Old-Timey Internet

#18

Post by pravus »

I remember when IRC clients and scripts didn't check the given port number (or ip address) when asked to initiate a DCC (Direct Client-to-Client) connection and you could exploit this by sending connection requests to a set of Microsoft's servers that were always up and running chargen with a hefty pipe behind it. If it was a chat the client would either lock up or get flooded off their dial-up connection. If it was a file transfer you could fill up a hard drive reasonably quickly since they were small back then. IRC used to be pretty rough and a lot of fun...

Re: Chargen: Good Intentions on the Old-Timey Internet

#19

Post by jlgaddis »

pravus wrote: post #18

I remember when IRC clients and scripts didn't check the given port number (or ip address) when asked to initiate a DCC (Direct Client-to-Client) connection and you could exploit this by sending connection requests to a set of Microsoft's servers that were always up and running chargen with a hefty pipe behind it. If it was a chat the client would either lock up or get flooded off their dial-up connection. If it was…

My favorite was to send a

  /ctcp #channel +++ATH0
and watch half of the users in a channel drop off.

Re: Chargen: Good Intentions on the Old-Timey Internet

#20

Post by icedchai »

_wldu wrote: post #17
dhosek wrote: post #3

Some of those good intentions got tested early enough. There was an instance of a student at Harvey Mudd in the 80s who set up mail forwarding from his Unix account to his VMS account and forwarding from his VMS account to his Unix account. The first e-mail that came in eventually brought both systems to their knees. And the trust remained pretty unbroken regardless of this. Into the 90s, I could telnet easily enough…

Some research edus in the US still run open networks with globally routed IPs on every node and no edge firewalls. While they are a dying breed, they still exist.

When I was in college in the 90's, the whole school was like that, including dorms. Fun times.
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