{
  "id": 6597891,
  "title": "VAX, TCP/IP, and Thirty Years of the Same Trust Problem",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/10/vax-tcp-ip-and-thirty-years-of-the-same-trust-problem",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-09-10T14:13:24.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/lafine_systemsdesign/vax-tcpip-and-thirty-years-of-the-same-trust-problem-3dba"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "In 1992, the speaker entered the computer security industry, working for a large US computer company's Japan office. They noticed that password protection had taken two separate paths - VAX running VMS used a 32-bit hash based on an AUTODIN-II CRC, while HP-UX used a DES-based hash through crypt(3) with a 12-bit salt. The VMS password protection was introduced in 1978, while HP-UX adopted its approach in 1980. However, both systems had significant weaknesses. HP-UX's trusted host mechanism, built on rlogin and .rhosts / hosts.equiv, was a major issue as trust was determined by hostname, which could be easily spoofed. The TCP/IP protocol, designed to connect different networks in 1974, did not include authentication or encryption, assuming a trusting research community. The VAX in question did not speak TCP/IP natively; VMS used DECnet, and HP-UX incorporated TCP/IP from 4.2BSD since 1983. In 1985, Robert Morris Sr. documented a weakness in the 4.2BSD UNIX TCP/IP software, revealing that TCP sequence numbers were predictable, allowing an attacker to impersonate a trusted host. His son, Robert Tappan Morris, released the Morris Worm in 1988, exploiting sendmail's DEBUG mode, a buffer overflow in fingerd, and trust abuse through .rhosts / hosts.equiv, among other methods. The worm infected roughly 6,000 systems, leading to the creation of CERT/CC at Carnegie Mellon to address computer security incidents.",
  "summary": "A Japanese version of this is on Note . I build RoamSwitch , a network security app for Mac and Linux, on my own. Maybe it's this line of work, but every time I write about AI agents automating cyberattacks, I keep thinking back to 1992, the year I entered this industry. What I was looking at then and what I'm looking at now are supposedly different technologies entirely, yet they keep feeling…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}