We have an f77 program that reads (free format) from unit 5 and writes
to unit 6. I want to let it run as a network service on our FreeBSD
box. The entry in inetd.conf is:

t stream tcp nowait nobody /usr/local/bin/t t -l

where t is the compiled program. In testing this works fine when
supplied with data using netcat, but several people have warned me
about security problems from doing this. I have thought about the
issues I hear about for C language programs, chiefly format string
attacks and buffer overflows and they don't seem like problems that
could occur in Fortran reads, at least of the 1977 variety. The
program itself doesn't include any calls to "sys" or do any IO other
than units 0, 5 and 6. Am I missing something? Are there well-known
weaknesses that I should be aware of?

Daniel Feenberg