Comment by dboreham
9 days ago
Most computers did not exist in an adversarial environment at the time.
Perhaps the most "adversarial" context would be: undergraduate timeshare use. So the mainframes of the day, which would be the typical platform for undergrad programming (if timeshare was even offered to undergrads in 1973) might be expected to be somewhat hardened to attacks of various kinds since undergrads trying to hack their grade higher, get more CPU time, etc, was a known thing.
But Unix machines, and minicomputers in general, were not used for undergrad purposes. They were only available to be used by PhD candidates and other higher order beings. Those dudes had the root password anyway, so no need to harden the machine against their potential attacks. There was no networking to speak of, so no malicious traffic to worry about. The first worm didn't appear until the late 1980s.
So if you had talked to a Unix sysadmin in 1973 (all...1 of them) they probably would understand the general concept of someone running a program that crapped onto kernel memory with the result they could have root privileges, but there would have been no plausible adversary around with any reason to mount that attack. Plus every cycle and every byte counted, so there would have been many more fish to fry before worrying about buffer overflow problems.
> since undergrads trying to hack their grade higher
Would student records even be stored on an unix system at the time? I am under the impression that Unix was very much a research operating system in the 1970's (either the subject of or a tool for). Administrative functions were more likely to be conducted with an IBM mainframe. (At least that is how it was when I arrived at university a couple of decades later, which I always took to be a legacy thing.)
Quite certainly not on v4 Unix, which apparently had few other sites and would not have been in the running for use as a serious university timesharing system. However Gates and Allen had already been among the secondary-school students who modified timesharing records to give themselves more time on a PDP-10 system https://web.archive.org/web/20191013171424/http://www.washin... .
One of the design scenarios of Multics was being resistant to attacks, and why it got an higher security assessment score than UNIX by the DoD.
Not in 1973, but still during the 1970's.