Tuesday·27·March·2007
The Software Museum inside the Software Museum //at 02:06 //by abe
Most Linuxers know that Debian and most of its users prefer stable software over up-to-date software. So do I, but sometimes this goes a little bit too far, e.g. when I find software which has been compiled years before the first line of Linux kernel code has been written:
C:\>ls +version GNU ls, Version 1.4.0.2 (compiled Sep 19 1990 12:43:10 for MS-DOS) C:\>ls -alF gnu\ total 521 drwxrwxrwx 1 anonymou anonymou 4096 Mar 26 23:16 ./ drwxrwxrwx 1 anonymou anonymou 4096 Mar 26 23:17 ../ -rwxrwxrwx 1 anonymou anonymou 17868 Sep 19 1990 cat.exe* -rwxrwxrwx 1 anonymou anonymou 20028 Sep 19 1990 cmp.exe* -rwxrwxrwx 1 anonymou anonymou 26780 Sep 19 1990 cp.exe* -rwxrwxrwx 1 anonymou anonymou 17948 Sep 19 1990 cut.exe* -rwxrwxrwx 1 anonymou anonymou 27138 Sep 24 1990 grep.exe* -rwxrwxrwx 1 anonymou anonymou 16572 Sep 19 1990 head.exe* -rwxrwxrwx 1 anonymou anonymou 27756 Sep 19 1990 ls.exe* -rwxrwxrwx 1 anonymou anonymou 23100 Sep 19 1990 mv.exe* -rwxrwxrwx 1 anonymou anonymou 19820 Sep 23 1990 rm.exe* -rwxrwxrwx 1 anonymou anonymou 37644 Sep 19 1990 tac.exe* -rwxrwxrwx 1 anonymou anonymou 20188 Sep 19 1990 tail.exe* C:\>
And yes, this looks like DOS. This is FreeDOS (1:0.0.b9r5a-3) inside of dosemu, packaged for Debian 4.0 Etch and installed from the original Debian archives.
BTW, the date looks quite authentic: According to the ChangeLog, Version 1.4 of the GNU Fileutils have been released on the 9th of September 1990. The oldest version of the GNU Fileutils (nowadays coreutils) available on the GNU FTP server is version 3.13 from July 1996, though.
I really wonder how many buffer overflows this version has. And I
wonder if there’s really a scenario in which this combination (Debian
→ dosemu → FreeDOS → GNU fileutils) could be exploited.
Tagged as: Debian, dosemu, Etch, FreeDOS, GNU, GNU Coreutils, GNU Fileutils, Linux, ls, Made my day, MS-DOS, Security, Vintage
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