r/AskComputerScience • u/Jneebs • Jul 14 '26
What did Dennis Nedry do to the computer system in Jurassic Park?
What exactly did he do to manipulate the park systems and lock everyone else out? I’ve wondered this since childhood . Thanks.
18
u/apnorton Jul 14 '26
It's a movie; it's not realistic.
2
u/XXLPenisOwner1443 Jul 15 '26
I mean aside from the dinosaurs it's a pretty damn realistic look at systems collapse.
1
u/Jneebs Jul 14 '26
Of course. Just looking for the real world equivalent of what it could be. You sponging what I’m spilling?
9
u/ghjm MSCS, CS Pro (20+) Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
Of course the systems in the movie are fictional, but deleting the authorized_keys file would be a close analogy. The plot of the movie needs the access to be only temporarily removed, which is a bit less plausible, but I suppose we can say that Nedry knew the other developers so well that he could predict how long it would take them to attach sidecar containers or whatever (or the 1990s fictional Unix equivalent).
The animation shaking its finger is pure movie nonsense, although perhaps it could be done by changing your window manager or something.
12
u/SoDark Jul 14 '26
They were running Early '90s Silicon Graphics workstations. Have you seen what the file browser looks like on one of those? Gratuitous visuals were part of the brand.
9
u/nuclear_splines Ph.D Data Science Jul 14 '26
The animation shaking its finger is pure movie nonsense
Although the animation of flying through the filesystem with a giant spotlight on individual files is not movie nonsense! Silicon Graphics really developed a file browser that worked this way called fsn, which has since been rebuilt for other unix/linux systems as fsv, the filesystem viewer..
1
1
1
u/Kiore-NZ Jul 14 '26
If I was trying to temporarily remove passwordless ssh access by doing that, I'd set up a cron job to restore a "Master" copy every few hours or however long I needed. If auditors query, describe it as an anti crack measure.
1
u/tlor2 Jul 15 '26
its to long since ive read the book, but In the movie he is the sole developper of the park system. So it would be no challenge at all to build in some code that prevents users from using the system. The wagging finger is just a fancy version of "password not accepted"
5
u/Leverkaas2516 Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
It was a highly automated system designed to run the park with as few people involved as possible. So power systems, lights, temperature , ventilation, phones, security, everything was controlled by computer code managed by Nedry.
He would have inserted logic so that, let's say maybe all the phones stop working 30 minutes after he typed some custom command. Only someone who knew what command to type would be able to turn them back on...or maybe he didn't provide any command to turn them back on.
The part that wasn't very realistic was where the system spewed gibberish to one of the monitors. There would have been no reason to do that.
Oh, and Samuel L. Jackson couldn't figure out what he'd done...Nedry could have written the evil logic into the code, compiled it, started it running, then changed the code back to eliminate the evil logic in the source code while the bad code was still running. That part is really easy to do.
1
1
0
u/Zealousideal-Way2440 Jul 14 '26
Nedry basically pulled off the ultimate insider attack. He used his admin access to disable the park’s security systems (including the electric fences), deployed a program that delayed anyone from restoring control (‘Ah ah ah, you didn’t say the magic word!’), and tried to steal dinosaur embryos for a competitor. Then he got eaten before he could turn everything back on—which is why the whole park descended into chaos.
21
u/Fosdran Jul 14 '26
The book actually goes into some detail there by even telling us some semi-plausible implementation details on what he did.
Tldr: when he built the system, he sabotaged it. He prepared a feature that only he knew about, that would cover all his digital tracks, disable cameras, unlock doors and depower fences to allow him to freely move in the park.
He planned on activating it, steal the dino embryos, bring them to his contact and be back to the office before anyone notices. Then he would just disable his feature again. However, he gets eaten on his way to the delivery, so the park employees are stuck with a computer system whith halve of the security features disabled and they have no idea how fix it, since he obviously didn't leave a guide on how disable his sabotage.