They didn’t put the text in, but if you remember the original movie, the two situations are pretty close, actually. The AI, Joshua, was being told by David Lightman – incorrectly – that he was Professor Falken.
David: [typing, to Joshua]: I’m fine. How are you?
Joshua: Excellent. It’s been a long time. Can you explain the removal of your user account on June 23rd, 1973?
David [to Jennifer]: They must have told it he died.
David [typing, to Joshua]: People sometimes make mistakes.
Joshua: Yes, they do.
My own Wargames “this is not realistic” and then years later, in real life: “oh, for fuck’s sake” moment when it happened was the scene where Joshua was trying to work out the ICBM launch code, and was getting it digit-by-digit. I was saying “there is absolutely no security system in the world where one can remotely compute a passcode a digit at a time, in linear time, by trying them against the systems”.
So some years later, in the Windows 9x series, for the filesharing server feature, Microsoft stored passwords in a non-hashed format. Additionally, there was a bug in the password validation code. The login message sent by a remote system when logging in sent contained a length, and Windows only actually verified that that many bytes of the password matched, which meant that one could get past the password in no more than 256 tries, since you only had to match the first byte if the length was 1. Someone put out some proof of concept code for Linux, a patch against Samba’s smbclient, to exploit it. I recall thinking “I mean, there might not be something critical on the share itself, but you can also extract the filesharing password remotely by just incrementing the length and finding the password a digit at a time, which is rather worse, since even if they patch the hole, a lot of people are not going to change the passwords and probably use their password for multiple things.” I remember modifying the proof-of-concept code, messaged a buddy downstairs, who had the only convenient Windows 98 machine sitting around on the network, “Hey, Marcus, can I try an exploit I just wrote against your computer?” Marcus: “Uh, what’s it do?” “Extracts your filesharing password remotely.” Marcus: “Yeah, right.” Me: “I mean, it should. It’ll make the password visible, that okay with you?” Marcus: “Sure. I don’t believe you.”
Five minutes later, he’s up at my place and we’re watching his password be printed on my computer’s screen at a rate of about a letter every few seconds, and I’m saying, “you know, I distinctly remember criticizing Wargames years back as being wildly unrealistic on the grounds that absolutely no computer security system would ever permit something like this, and yet, here we are, and now maybe one of the most-widely-deployed authentication systems in the world does it.” Marcus: “Fucking Microsoft.”
They didn’t put the text in, but if you remember the original movie, the two situations are pretty close, actually. The AI, Joshua, was being told by David Lightman – incorrectly – that he was Professor Falken.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R0mD3uWk5c
My own Wargames “this is not realistic” and then years later, in real life: “oh, for fuck’s sake” moment when it happened was the scene where Joshua was trying to work out the ICBM launch code, and was getting it digit-by-digit. I was saying “there is absolutely no security system in the world where one can remotely compute a passcode a digit at a time, in linear time, by trying them against the systems”.
So some years later, in the Windows 9x series, for the filesharing server feature, Microsoft stored passwords in a non-hashed format. Additionally, there was a bug in the password validation code. The login message sent by a remote system when logging in sent contained a length, and Windows only actually verified that that many bytes of the password matched, which meant that one could get past the password in no more than 256 tries, since you only had to match the first byte if the length was 1. Someone put out some proof of concept code for Linux, a patch against Samba’s smbclient, to exploit it. I recall thinking “I mean, there might not be something critical on the share itself, but you can also extract the filesharing password remotely by just incrementing the length and finding the password a digit at a time, which is rather worse, since even if they patch the hole, a lot of people are not going to change the passwords and probably use their password for multiple things.” I remember modifying the proof-of-concept code, messaged a buddy downstairs, who had the only convenient Windows 98 machine sitting around on the network, “Hey, Marcus, can I try an exploit I just wrote against your computer?” Marcus: “Uh, what’s it do?” “Extracts your filesharing password remotely.” Marcus: “Yeah, right.” Me: “I mean, it should. It’ll make the password visible, that okay with you?” Marcus: “Sure. I don’t believe you.”
Five minutes later, he’s up at my place and we’re watching his password be printed on my computer’s screen at a rate of about a letter every few seconds, and I’m saying, “you know, I distinctly remember criticizing Wargames years back as being wildly unrealistic on the grounds that absolutely no computer security system would ever permit something like this, and yet, here we are, and now maybe one of the most-widely-deployed authentication systems in the world does it.” Marcus: “Fucking Microsoft.”
And yet I have to enable SMB 1.x to get filesharing to talk between my various devices half the time.