Wireless insecurity at NANOG meetings

Joel Jaeggli joelja at darkwing.uoregon.edu
Mon Sep 23 17:00:27 UTC 2002


On Sun, 22 Sep 2002, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

> 
> On Sun, 22 Sep 2002, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, Sep 22, 2002 at 01:11:07PM +0200, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
> > > > There are also people ssh'ing to personal and corporate machines from
> > > > the terminal room where the root password is given out or easily
> > > > available.
> 
> > > Are you saying people shouldn't SSH?
> 
> > I've seen far too many people get into trouble because they have some
> > flawed thinking that "ssh == always secure", even against compromises of
> > one of the endpoints. If root is available, a reasonable person should
> > ASSUME that some bored individual (like Bandy Rush) has taken 30 seconds
> > and recompiled the ssh binaries with a password logger.

When we hosted nanog 16 we made the effort to periodically compare the md5 
sums of the binaries on the terminal room machines to a reference source. 
I wouldn't personally place a greate deal of trust in machines that 
aren't in ones possession  but we try.
 
> Excellent point. Fortunately, this doesn't apply to running SSH from your
> laptop over the wireless network.
> 

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Joel Jaeggli	      Academic User Services   joelja at darkwing.uoregon.edu    
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