[Cryptography] Buffer overflows from 1974

[Steven M. Bellovin]

On 4 Jan 2026, at 20:52, Peter Gutmann via cryptography wrote:

>
>
> Henry Baker <hbaker1 at pipeline.com> writes:
>
>> It would be interesting to see if some of the new (claimed-to-be-safer)
>> variants of C would complain at compile-time about this old code.
>
> It was written on a PDP-11... I'm guessing 45 with 32KW memory using ed on a
> Model 33 teletype, it couldn't run anything beyond the most basic pre-K&R C.
> This also explains the... unfortunate coding style, if it hurts to edit
> anything other than the line you're currently in the process of entering you'd
> want to minimise the amount of typing and re-typing necessary.  So any new
> code wouldn't be written in anything like this style regardless of the
> compiler or C variant.
>
More likely a Model 37 teletype, given the lower case/upper case distinction.
To be sure, Unix systems of that era did support upper-case only terminals,
but it's hard to see them being the usual devices if case difference was
important.


        --Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb