On Tue, 8 Jun 2010 17:36:03 -0400, Pinnacle <pinnc...@rochester.rr.com> wrote:
. . . >Barry, > >It would be nice if someone actually documented a hole, instead of all the >urban legends we hear. Outside the magic SVC, or a trusted person planting >malware in an APF library, I don't know of any "holes". Please share. > I'm with Barry on this one. For about twenty years my day job (or at least part of it) was to seek out such exposures. I found dozens of problems in products from just about any vendor you care to name, and yes, that includes IBM. What do I mean by 'problem'? Well, in just about every case I was able to write a small demonstration program which could get control in supervisor state. Some of the vendors were extremely apathetic when it came to fixing such problems. Often it took them two, three, or more attempts to get it right. A certain well known vendor took five years to fix an issue. A problem in another very popular product was uncorrected three vendors (think takeovers) and eleven years later. I moved on so I don't know if it ever got fixed - I suspect not. Things have improved, but only very slowly. I first became aware of the user key CSA issue about thirty years ago (!). User key CSA problems have only really gone away in the last few years when IBM took the trouble to show their disapproval. As for magic SVCs, they obviously still exist, as a recent thread here proved. More of a worry is the SVC which the author thinks is 100% safe, when it is anything but. I'll bet that the old SPFCOPY SVC, or something derived from it, is still out there on many systems. Those SVCs usually have as many holes as a piece of fine emmentaler. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
