full-disclosure - alert: the 111111 bug

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Message-ID: <200507050459.j654xseG031876@turing-police.cc.vt.edu>
Date: Tue Jul  5 06:00:24 2005
From: Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu (Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu)
Subject: alert: the 111111 bug 

On Mon, 04 Jul 2005 00:03:02 BST, lsi said:

> I noticed one of my customers using the "special" date of 11/11/11 in 
> their database.  

*yawn*.  IBM mainframe systems coded expiration dates on the machine-readable
volume labels on tapes in a YYDDD format.  One popular tape management system
from the late 80s and early 90s assigned special meaning to 98000 and 99000.
Somehow, things didn't go bonkers when 1998 or 1999 started.

Of *bigger* concern is that of all the Y2K mitigation work done 5 years ago,
up to 70% didn't actually widen the data fields to 4-digit years, but instead
modified the code to use "windowing":  "If NN < 30 then year = 20NN else year
equals 19NN".  Of course, some programs used 30, some 40, some 45, and so on,
so there's lots of little disasters waiting to go boom every 5 or 10 years
for the next half-century.

Ob-Security:  The clever attacker can probably figure out how to use this to
make the bank think an account was opened 101 years ago, and collect the interest,
or similar hacks based on causing an over/underflow.  The first batch of
windowed programs should be ripening in about 4.5 years. :)
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