Whitelist of update servers

Mon Mar 12 21:03:22 UTC 2012

On 03/12/2012 10:53 AM, William Herrin wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 4:40 PM, Peter Kristolaitis<alter3d at alter3d.ca>  wrote:
>> On 12-03-12 04:34 PM, Maverick wrote:
>>> Like list of sites that operating systems or applications installed on
>>> your machines go to update themselves. One way could be to go on each
>>> vendors site and look at their update servers like
>>> microsoft.update.com but it would be good if there is a list of such
>>> servers for all OS and applications so that it could be used as a
>>> whitelist.
>> I'm trying to determine if this is supposed to be an exercise in
>>     "How To Annoy Your Sysadmins"
>> or
>>     "How To Do Network Security The Really, Really Wrong Way"
>> or some combination of the two....
> Pete,
>
> There are scenarios in which it is completely reasonable to provide
> white listed Web access instead of general Internet access. Consider:
> PCs in a prison with access to legal library and off-site education
> web sites. It would be helpful if they could also access automatic
> updates so they don't get malware but God help the sysadmin if one of
> the prisoners figures out how to get to child porn.
But there are ways of doing that, such as Windows Software Update 
Services, and a little bit of policy enforcement from a centralised 
place.  That gives you a centralised, controlled place to push updates 
out from without risking the machines going off to the internet to get 
them themselves (and an opportunity to try limited roll-out just in case.)

For that matter if it's necessary to be talking about 
blacklisting/whitelisting sites under such conditions as PCs in a prison 
you're really better off just paying for something like a Websense to 
take care of it.

Paul