On Thursday 22 April 2010, Mark Townsley wrote: > On 4/22/10 6:38 PM, Timothy Baldwin wrote: > > There are many ssh servers with default or poorly chosen passwords, so > > that might not be a good idea. > > So Bob's bad password means Alice has to figure out how to configure a > pinhole for ssh because she wants her ssh to be reachable from the > Internet. On the other hand: Alices (I would call Alice a geek - she is using ssh after all) desire to have a reachable ssh port means that Bob (let's assume he knows nothing about computing, but is a very fine chef) is vulnerable to attacks. Just because nobody told him to click a specific button that he knew nothing about. I would assume Alice capable of opening a port, but would guess Bob gets very apprehensive when he is told to configure his home router. > Hardly fair, particularly when we don't even know what the > intrusion rate would be for a given service/protocol over IPv6. I think we can assume it to grow proportionately with the growth of IPv6 - it is practically nil now because attackers don't consider IPv6 gurus dumb enough to have default passwords on open ssh ports. > Modern IPS firewalls actually have provisions for sniffing and blocking > login attempts from the outside using poor/default passwords. But this > isn't foolproof, and requires digging deeply into packets. I don't think the master chef Bob would have an IPS firewall - all he wanted was to connect his kitchen computer to this Internet thing because we heard there were good recipes out there. > It would be really nice if applications would be easily configurable for > what IPv6 address scope they could use. Then when you turn on SSH, you > are simply asked whether it should be made available on the Internet or > not. Open a feature request on your favorite bugzilla... ;-) More realistically: there will always be thousands of very popular applications out there with insecure defaults. I spent the last ten years (that's my entire career) trying to educate my programmer colleagues and friends about secure programming. I think I can count the ones I've reached on one hand - either I'm a bad teacher or it is not a popular topic. Konrad
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.