MS-DOS security [Was: Re: GnuPG cannot know if is runs in a "secure" environment (Re: standard comment)]

[Peter Pentchev]

On Fri, May 29, 2026 at 11:49:28PM -0400, marqueandreprisal--- via Gnupg-users wrote:
[snip]
> Like I said generally PGP was
> designed for DOS which is pretty good security wise.

Sigh. I assume (okay, well, I remember Phil Zimmermann's PGP, so I know) that
when you say "DOS", you mean MS-DOS and not any of the other literally dozens,
if not hundreds, of formerly popular disk operating systems out there.

I remember MS-DOS. Without any intent to offend anybody, I can assure you that
security was never a design goal there. And it was never achieved. I mean,
it took under a hundred lines of barely competent assembly (I know, it was
my second attempt at 8086 assembly :)) to write a stealth resident program.
For somebody who knew what they were doing, it took less than 512 bytes to
write an incredibly powerful stealth virus (look up V512/Number of the Beast).
Any program could intercept (and disable!) any interrupt. Any program could
access any I/O ports.

No, MS-DOS was not "pretty good security wise". It was never meant to be,
and it never was. So please, please stop repeating that.

G'luck,
Peter

-- 
Peter Pentchev  roam at ringlet.net roam at debian.org peter at morpheusly.com
PGP key:        https://www.ringlet.net/roam/roam.key.asc
Key fingerprint 2EE7 A7A5 17FC 124C F115  C354 651E EFB0 2527 DF13
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