Comment by aus_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aus_ | Hacker News Reader

For the security researchers out there, mainframes are really under-researched. There just aren't many people that have the expertise in the platform required for security research. And most of the people who do have expertise in the platform are often oblivious to technologies outside of the mainframe. (If you've ever dealt with mainframe people, you might know what I am talking about.) It's unfortunate, but too often true. Our best mainframe guy is brilliant. I've never met anyone more technically skilled in his platform. But ask him a basic Windows or a Linux question? Forget it.

With today's complex stack of multiple platforms in most enterprises, a good security researcher, IMHO, should be fluent with both worlds. Mainframes are where some of our most critical data is stored. When you pull up your account balance through your bank's website, there's a good chance that value was read off a mainframe.

Mainframers are old-school. They don't believe in public disclosure or open security models or public audits. If you go through the DEFCON and BlackHat archives, there's not much mainframe research out there. There's just a small community of mainframers on the Internet, but it's a significant part of the world's infrastructure. The mainframe world is a crazy alternate reality. (I know, because it's my day job.)

Phillip Young, the guy who owns this Tumblr project, has made some waves in this community. His talks are a great place to start. Here's a few resources to get you started:

[0]: http://mainframed767.tumblr.com/

[1]: http://bigendiansmalls.tumblr.com/

[2]: https://media.blackhat.com/us-13/US-13-Young-Mainframes-The-...

[3]: http://www.slideshare.net/bigendiansmalls/security-necromanc...

[4]: https://defcon.org/images/defcon-22/dc-22-presentations/Youn...

[5]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xfl4spvM5DI

[6]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ra4Ehmifh4

Also, IBM.com has a wealth of documentation. (They have terrible SEO though.) Checkout the z/OS RedBooks and manauls there.

The difficulty I see in trying to get involved with mainframes is that I can't physically tinker with one to get those "aha" moments.

You can blame IBM for that. The fact that they haven't made it easy for security researchers (or anyone really) to tinker hurts the platform.

Up until a few years ago, there was no legal way to run z/OS on hardware that wasn't a million dollar hunk of iron from IBM. IBM has since made a product called Rational Developer and Test Suite [0] available. With it, you get an emulator and a licensed copy of z/OS that you can run on x86. Except it's $9,500 / year.

The only saving grace is an open source project called Hercules [1] which emulates the z/Architecture. If you don't mind breaking some copyright laws, there is no technical reason why you can't download a copy of z/OS and run it under Hercules. But good luck finding the latest version. Want to test your research against the latest maintenance levels? Good luck.

[0]: http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/ratideveandtesten...

[1]: http://www.hercules-390.eu/

[2]: http://mainframed767.tumblr.com/post/40836059586/instruction...

Funny thing is that mainframes might have earned their reputation for security if architectures such as Burroughs or i432 won out. Instead, IBM dominates the market and we know S/360 architecture was optimized for performance not security. That along with IBM backward compatibility seems to be how it won. The obscurity of almost every aspect of it along with barrier-to-entry is why it got less scrutiny.

So, it all adds up to a platform that should be very easy to smash and have literally decades worth of vulnerabilities built in. Should be some horrid design decisions in there, too, which might not be just a patch job. Mainframe hacking is literally a goldmine people should get into. Plus, those that prefer a boring, 8a-5p job with good pay and excellent job security will benefit from learning mainframe (or COBOL). Do the daily grind, play with shit on the test/dev partitions (LPARS?), and have fun hacking after work.

And you're right that the Redbooks are good. My only disagreement is that, if looking for mainframe, the SEO actually is too good in that all I get are Redbooks and IBM articles. That's when I'm looking for independent assessments of it. It's like Google wanted to drown me in their shit while I was actually looking for an independent assessment of Channel I/O, TCO, etc. Found some of it but it was work.

EDIT: Only thing that confused me was when the presentation said he bought a mainframe. How the hell did he buy a mainframe? I thought you had to be rolling in cash to even get an entry-level model with z/OS and z/VM. Re-edit, I found two answers to that question for people with some cash and who want to hack mainframes. See below:

http://www.informationweek.com/ibm-debuts-lower-cost-$75000-...?

http://www.eweek.com/servers/new-ibm-zenterprise-bc12-entry-... (Says you can get one as low as $1,965 a month. Bet it can't do shit but that's affordable.)

> For the security researchers out there, mainframes are really under-researched.

I suspect it has to do with the price tag. For Windows/Linux, I can just install the system on a random PC I have lying around, or at least buy a PC for very little money (in the grand scheme of things). With mainframes, few companies have one just standing around for you to tinker with. If IBM were willing to license z/OS (and their other mainframe OSes) to run on Hercules for such purposes, that might go a long way. But so far they seem to have no interest in that.

Casual exploration of the platform becomes very hard when a small mainframe is... what? $/€ 100,000?

And the complexity of the platform encourages specialization. (Try asking a competent Windows/Linux guy a mainframe question, they will probably give you a blank stare as well. FWIW, I am a Windows/Linux guy, too, I just was lucky enough to have a brief stint in a mainframe team during my training.)

Are there any places online to play with things like this? I used to admin Solaris machines back in the day and always wanted to learn more about mainframes. I'm not sure if there are any spots where you can get a free sandbox account on these types of things or not...

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