alt Hacker NewsIf you're connecting to a host on a port < 1024, then you know a SysAdmin must have set it up, and it must be trustworthy. It was a simpler time.
If you're connecting to a host on a port < 1024, then you know a SysAdmin must have set it up, and it must be trustworthy. It was a simpler time.
It's more that Unix systems were timesharing systems, any user could run a daemon, but you didn't want users to have the ability to grab a port used by system services, not just because they could impersonate a system service on the network, but also because then you couldn't trust localhost services, either, as well as it just being a PITA. This is still true today; though vanishingly few Linux systems are multi-tenant, it's still common to implicitly trust a local service.