Morris Worm Decompiled (1988)

Morris is an American professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He co-founded the online store Viaweb, one of the first web-based applications, with Paul Graham.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris

Re: Morris Worm Decompiled (1988)

#5

Post by gnosis » Thu, Nov 18, 2010, 1:34 AM UTC

jey wrote: post #3

This looks like it's not the original source code and was just reconstructed by hand from a disassembly/"decompile" of the worm.

Just out of curiosity, what makes you think that?

Re: Morris Worm Decompiled (1988)

#6

Post by sparky » Thu, Nov 18, 2010, 1:39 AM UTC

gnosis wrote: post #5

jey wrote: post #3

This looks like it's not the original source code and was just reconstructed by hand from a disassembly/"decompile" of the worm.

Just out of curiosity, what makes you think that?

The comments, mostly. For example:

    object objects[69];				/* Don't know how many... */
    
    /* This report a sucessful breakin by sending a single byte to "128.32.137.13"
     * (whoever that is). */

    /* This appears to be a structure unique to this program.  It doesn't seem that
     * the blank slots are really an array of characters for the hostname, but
     * maybe they are.
     */

    /* There are pieces of "stub" code, presumably from something like this to
       get rid of error messages */

Re: Morris Worm Decompiled (1988)

#7

Post by tylernol » Thu, Nov 18, 2010, 1:51 AM UTC

@gnosis and sparky,

text offsets are also put in comments next to the function declarations. For example: "h_clean() /* 0x31f0 */"

Re: Morris Worm Decompiled (1988)

#8

Post by cloudwalking » Thu, Nov 18, 2010, 1:55 AM UTC

I wonder how he devised (or found) the list of potential passwords (cracksome.c.txt)

Re: Morris Worm Decompiled (1988)

#9

Post by djcapelis » Thu, Nov 18, 2010, 1:56 AM UTC

jluxenberg wrote: post #4

Excerpt from the Wikipeida article about the worm's author: Morris is an American professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He co-founded the online store Viaweb, one of the first web-based applications, with Paul Graham. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris

He also worked on Chord, which became a basis for distributed hash tables and a few other things. He is as successful as a researcher as he has been with the whole gaining tenure and doing viaweb/ycombinator with pg thing.

Frankly he's up there with Steve Jobs and maybe Fabrice Bellard in terms of "people who I'd like to know what it is they're doing so right so consistently." It's the consistency that tends to surprise me.

Re: Morris Worm Decompiled (1988)

#10

Post by dustingetz » Thu, Nov 18, 2010, 2:26 AM UTC

jluxenberg wrote: post #4

Excerpt from the Wikipeida article about the worm's author: Morris is an American professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He co-founded the online store Viaweb, one of the first web-based applications, with Paul Graham. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris

"Robert Morris was tried and convicted of violating the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. After appeals he was sentenced to three years probation, 400 hours of community service, and a fine of $10,000.[6]"