Re: Hey old people

[David Dagon <dagon () cc gatech edu>]

On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 10:44:54PM -0800, Blue Boar wrote:
> http://www.osvdb.org/blog/?p=77
>
> Any of you guys remember any really old vulnerabilities?

(A colleague pointed this out to me.  More at
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=205511.1017054)

Well, back in the day, people used to communicate using semaphor
towers and flag armatures.  Spies would watch the towers to intercept
the messages, until Chappes (and others) used simple crypto code books
to protect the data.

   http://people.deas.harvard.edu/~jones/cscie129/images/history/chappe.html

We use to get pretty good bandwidth with the towers, albeit with high
latency.

In 1796, Abraham Edelcrantz wrote "A Treatise on Telegraphs", which
noted the use of the code phrase "001-727" by a telegraph operator,
meaning "I am in custody", or the telegraph station has been overrun
by the enemy.  This is a type of overflow attack, or perhaps a denial
of service.

-- 
David Dagon              /"\                          "When cryptography
dagon () cc gatech edu      \ /  ASCII RIBBON CAMPAIGN    is outlawed, bayl
Ph.D. Student             X     AGAINST HTML MAIL      bhgynjf jvyy unir
Georgia Inst. of Tech.   / \                           cevinpl."
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