Reasons why BIND isn't being upgraded

Fri Feb 2 02:56:46 UTC 2001

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I think if anything is to be stressed here is that it should be left up to the
administrator of the network to choose whether they wish the version records to
be available or not.  Theory can be argued for it to either be enabled or
disabled but honestly I wouldn't care either way if the choice was left to me
and by default it was not enabled until I specified otherwise.  I had no idea
that named had ever responded this way until it was posted to this list to my
surprise.  I am not an advocate of security through obscurity however I don't
feel that administrators should be removing all doubt to script kiddies of what
versions of software they are running so easily.  Make them work for it.

Greg

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- -----Original Message-----
From: Adam McKenna [mailto:adam at flounder.net]
Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2001 6:13 PM
To: nanog at merit.edu
Subject: Re: Reasons why BIND isn't being upgraded

On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 06:07:44PM -0800, Paul Vixie wrote:
> Simon at wretched.demon.co.uk (Simon Waters) writes:
> > I remain unconvinced that showing the version string helps much.
>
> it helped you with your survey, didn't it?
>
> hiding it doesn't help at all.  people who want to know if you're vulnerable
> and to what have tools to find out.
>
> hiding it DOES however make it harder for people (including network owners)
> to do surveys.

I always thought that it was regarded as generally good security practice to
give out as little information about your systems as possible, and none at
all if you can help it.  The BIND version should at least only be accessible
from a set of defined IP addresses, defaulting to 127/8.

- --Adam

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