🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <727@sauron.UUCP> campbell@sauron.UUCP (Mark Campbell) writes:
>Ritchie's SUID parent is numbered 4,135,240 and was dated January 16, 1979.
>     
>Protection of data file contents.


hmmmm... I guess the patent office didn't know about JACCT on TOPS-10.

The first time I hears of the SUID I thought "what a nifty general
way to do JACCT".  Is there a difference?

[For those of you who aren't old DEC-10 hackers... JACCT means
 "Job Always Control-C Trapped".  That was apparently an EXTREMELY
 old feature of it.  Anyway, it was a bit which would be set in
 the user's priveledges (actually it was off in another word of
 the user data structure...) when the user executed a special 
 program (anything executed from a [1,*] directory whose name
 was mentioned on a list which was compiled in the kernal (PRVTAB)).
 The bit gave the user equivalent to [1,2] priveledges (i.e.
 anything the user wanted to do).  The reason the Job was Always
 Control-C Trapped was was for old versions where a user could
 run a jacct program, control-c, then ddt it and be able to
 do anything he wanted... Control-C trapping stopped the user
 from doing that, so the user can now only do what the jacct'd
 program wanted to do.]

Now, using this facility one can 'emulate' the SUID facility to
an extent.  You run the program, you instantly have full access
to all files, you can also change user-id easily, etc.  So you
do so.  Then when you're done the program changes back and exits.
(dropping the jacct status, etc...)

It's of course trivial to emulate the jacct facility on suid.

As I see it suid is merely a refinement of jacct... not a new thing.

Have I missed something?

(BTW, jacct is a very old facility... I first ran into it in 1977
when I first got on a tops-10 machine... I'm not sure how long
beforehand it was in tops-10)
-- 
David Herron,  cbosgd!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET, david@ms.uky.csnet
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