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Early UNIX Contributor Robert Morris Dead at 78
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."
If we send condolences by email, will we crash the internet?
Conventional Burial? /dev/null ?
Cremation?
Crygenic Preservation?
.
.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Robert T Morris into this world, why didn't he take him (and his worm) out? -- In all seriousness, he did a lot for the UNIX community and will be missed.
Out? Wind?
Fuck you, New York Times.
# /sbin/init /bin/cp RM RTM /bin/true /sbin/shutdown -r now
#
#
#
universe# mv /home/rmorris /usr/archive/
universe# userdel rmorris
Here is the full text of the article due to the paywall suddenly becoming active for some:
Robert Morris, a cryptographer who helped developed the Unix computer operating system, which controls an increasing number of the world’s computers and touches almost every aspect of modern life, died on Sunday in Lebanon, N.H. He was 78.
The cause was complications of dementia, his wife, Anne Farlow Morris, said.
Known as an original thinker in the computer science world, Mr. Morris also played an important clandestine role in planning what was probably the nation’s first cyberwar: the electronic attacks on Saddam Hussein’s government in the months leading up to the Persian Gulf war of 1991.
Although details are still classified, the attacks, along with laser-guided bombs, are believed to have largely destroyed Iraq’s military command and control capability before the war began.
Begun as a research effort at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in the 1960s, Unix became one of the world’s leading operating systems, along with Microsoft’s Windows. Variations of the original Unix software, for example, now provide the foundation for Apple’s iPhone iOS and Macintosh OSX as well as Google’s Android operating systems.
As chief scientist of the National Security Agency’s National Computer Security Center, Mr. Morris gained unwanted national attention in 1988 after his son, Robert Tappan Morris, a graduate student in computer science at Cornell University, wrote a computer worm — a software program — that was able to propel itself through the Internet, then a brand-new entity.
Although it was intended to hide in the network as a bit of Kilroy-was-here digital graffiti, the program, because of a design error, spread wildly out of control, jamming more than 10 percent of the roughly 50,000 computers that made up the network at the time.
After realizing his error, the younger Mr. Morris fled to his parents’ home in Arnold, Md., before turning himself in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was convicted under an early federal computer crime law, sentenced to probation and ordered to pay a $10,000 fine and perform community service. He later received a computer science doctorate at Harvard University and is now a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer science faculty.
Robert Morris was born in Boston on July 25, 1932, the son of Walter W. Morris, a salesman, and Helen Kelly Morris. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a master’s in applied mathematics from Harvard.
At Bell Laboratories he initially worked on the design of specialized software tools known as compilers, which convert programmers’ instructions into machine-readable language that can be directly executed by computers.
Beginning in 1970, he worked with the Unix research group at Bell Laboratories, where he was a major contributor in both the numerical functions of the operating system and its security capabilities, including the password system and encryption functions.
His interest in computer security deepened in the late 1970s as he continued to explore cryptography, the study and practice of protecting information by converting it into code. With another researcher, he began working on an academic paper that unraveled an early German encryption device.
Before the paper could be published, however, he received an unexpected call from the National Security Agency. The agency invited him to visit, and when he met with officials, they asked him not to publish the paper because of what it might reveal about the vulnerabilities of modern cryptographic systems.
He complied, and in 1986 went to work for the agency in protecting government computers and in projects involving electronic surveillance and online warfare. Although little is known about his classified work for the government, Mr. Morris
"the [cyber] attacks, along with laser-guided bombs"
Does no-one else find this hilarious?
God@heaven /usr/earth/RobertTappanMorris sudo mv soul.bin /heaven /usr/earth/RobertTappanMorris rm -f * /usr/earth/RobertTappanMorris cd .. /usr/earth/ chmod 777 RobertTappanMorris
password:
God@heaven
God@heaven
God@heaven
(later other users will move his empty directory to /usr/earth/cemetery)
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
The computer worm was invented by the sci-fi author John Brunner in his 1975 novel "The Shockwave Rider". The first real implementation of a computer worm was published by John Shoch and Jon Hupp of Xerox PARC in 1982 (CACM Vol 25 No 3). I wrote my first one in 1985 (on BNA) but I am quite sure that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other people had written their own versions by then. Robert TAPPAN Morris only released his worm in 1988. This is important because today we have the situation where large corporations are claiming patents on inventions that have been common knowledge for fifty years or more. We, the /. crowd, need to keep reminding people, especially the USPTO, of PRIOR ART. Otherwise the whole free/open software movement will be dead within a few years.
RM really contributed a lot to all *nix users.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
No, Robert Morris, Jr did not invent the computer worm. He build the first "successful" worm.
If you look at old videos of the TV reports at the time security folks identified it as a worm by name right away. The term was discussed briefly in an OS class in college a few years earlier.
Isn't 78 a little late to be taking exams? Or am I just ageist?
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.
Some people I know at the NSA claim Morris would lie on the floor and let his cats clean his beard for him.
Rest in peace, sir.
how is babby formed?
You mean computers weren't developed by a bunch of 20-somethings? Dear god what is this world coming to? Have to wonder why age discrimination is so rampant in IT.
I worked with Bob Morris (rhm) at Bell Labs back around 1980. We were on a Bell Labs Navy contract, and Bob was on loan to the project from his usual research hacking. We were doing signal processing stuff, decoding sonar data. Anyway, I was a UNIX hacker kid (I was about 20 at the time) and he was a really sharp gadfly/rascal BTL CS research guy. We were colleagues and there was some friendly sniping back and forth between us.
/bin/login had changed overnight!
/bin/login, I have some encrypted files. He didn't sound too interested. I told him the files were in Bob Morris's $HOME. He said, "send the files right over here."
/bin/login to save usernames and passwords in a file somewhere, I think xored with -1 or something. Nothing fancy. There were also uucp logs of his sending either the login.c or his password booty to some another Bell Labs research system (allegra, I think, for those who remember).
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
I mean, seeing how he's God and all, I'd think He can run as root all He pleases ;-)
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
The first computer worm was the CREEPER, which appeared on ARPANET in 1971.
Palm trees and 8
Early UNIX Contributor Robert Morris Dead at 78
"Late UNIX Contributor Robert Morris Dead at 78"
There, fixed that for you.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
AC is correct.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I forget exactly what year it was, but I was a Unix newbie trying to learn security, and working at Bell Labs, and had an account that I thought I had gotten to be fairly secure. I got a call the next morning from somebody who did not immediately identify himself telling me what was in my "secure" file, and suggesting several different ways he could have broken in. RHM was department head for computer security at the time; a week later one of his folks did another attack on another threat I'd missed (though that only knocked me off my session by kicking my modem into loopback, but didn't actually break in.) I learned a lot from him - was it really ~30 years ago?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
... I suspect foul play!
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those that understand this sig, and those that beat up people who do.
I worked for Cray from 1986 to 1989. I was a junior sysadmin and had to learn Unix on Cray by myself, as it was ported onto the machines by the developers. I had to figure out how to build the kernel, libraries, shell, utilities, and compilers. I was given a full source tree, a short manual, and sessions from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. every day on a Cray 1M. Apart from that I was on my own and I had no previous Unix experience.
One of my early experiments was a trojan login program. I would login normally on one of the machine's terminals then "exec trojanlogin". The trojan would mimic the "login:" and "password:" prompt at the terminal where I left it running. I would walk away and it would capture input from the next person who walked up to the terminal. It wasn't an original idea but copying somebody else's idea and writing the code to do it taught me a lot about getty, login, and shell. Just what I needed at the time.
I forgot all about it until one day I needed a small text file to send to test the local printer on the Cray. I picked a small file from my home directory and cat the file to /dev/lpr. A few minutes later my boss went to the machine room, came back, and asked me why a list of the operator passwords was on the printer......
Featured prominently in Stephen Levy's "Hackers".
Always wished I'd met you.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!