[Info-vax] VAX Phone Pandora Psychiatrist Chatbot

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2020-10-28 03:48:12 +0000, Supratim Sanyal said:

> On real MicroVAX running OpenVMS with networking, hook up the [ELIZA] 
> feedback psychiatrist program to a VAX Phone automatic responder, kind 
> of like a chat bot.
> 
> So, someone on the network could do PHONE MARIAH::[ELIZA] and it will 
> be answered by [ELIZA] and a dialog would ensue.

The DEC PHONE protocol is not a complex protocol, and you'll either be 
reversing that protocol, or scrounging up a copy of the PHONE source 
listings and skimming through that. The PHONE protocol hasn't changed 
in ~forever.

For the meddler-in-the-middle approach to reversing the PHONE protocol 
here, present a spoofed object 29 on one DECnet host and connect to 
PHONE object 29 on a second, connect a PHONE client to the MITM host, 
and then read and log and pass messages between between the client and 
the (real) server.

There was a PHONE "tee" program written in DCL back some 25 years ago 
which initiated calls to two different users, connecting those two 
users together, having spoofed to each the other user as the caller. 
There were other similar programs that sent mail directly using the 
MAIL-11 protocol. Not that I have samples of either genre immediately 
handy.

As these spoofing tools became more prevalent, DECnet was "hardened" to 
(optionally) require privileges for certain connections. Not that 
requiring privileges did or could do much with any compromised hosts. 
Some 🤡 discussed that security detail here:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.vms/0t-ruqRRVuM/Vr09KCUsfhgJ

In addition to the above, here are some DECnet task-to-task and 
to-object DCL examples, some of which target PHONE-11.

http://phrack.org/issues/27/6.html
https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v80/hoffman_examples/xqtype.com
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.vms/GT5YkJ44ZKs/NO79jGWyMUwJ
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.vms/ydH-sDQB7oY/qtr_wbEoS1kJ
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.vms/0t-ruqRRVuM/Vuyz5umSJcwJ

And for those unfamiliar with ELIZA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA


-- 
Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC