[ On Saturday, May 27, 2000 at 22:20:23 (-0700), Erik Fair wrote: ]
> Subject: inetd.conf defaults
>
> What do you all think?

I think if shell and login are disabled by default then so should telnet
be disabled by default, and perhaps ftp should be configured to be
anonymous only by default too.

I.e. if you're doing this for security reasons then the biggest reason
of all should be to prevent passwords from being sent in the clear.  The
risks to shell and login from DNS and TCP spoofing are somewhat lower
than those of sniffing I think (at least they are if you assume DNS is
set up properly and that border routers prevent source address spoofing,
etc., by default :-)

In fact given the availability of sniffing tools it's actually a lot
"safer" to use rsh, rcp, and rlogin internally with ~/.rhosts than it is
to use telnet and ftp.  Your local colleagues are less likely to play
ARP and TCP spoofing games than they are to just sniff for your
password (or any other password you may type! ;-).

BTW, that reminds me:  What do people who don't 100% trust their local
network neighbours do when they only have an X11 terminal on their desk
and they need to type a sensitive password (eg. typing the root password
to "su" through an xterm process running on a local server)?  My NCDs
don't run SSH or any other secure protocol, unfortunately....  One time
passwords would be some help here (assuming they're properly
configured), as would a PKC challenge/response scheme, but those all
depend on the target system whereas I'm really looking for some way to
securely send secret information directly from my X11 terminal.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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