On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 08:31:17AM +0100, Ingo Juergensmann wrote: > Wouter Verhelst said: > > There's nothing funny about that. Before the compromise -when > > It's funny as in sarcastic fun. > > > ftp-master.d.o was still not restricted- there was no point in trying to > > close down SSH access, as there were a thousand developers that had > > shell access to that machine. Closing down a simple one-command SSH > > access, and/or HTTP access, from buildd machines in such a situation is > > pointless; it's far easier for an attacker to compromise a Debian > > Developer's machine than to try to break into an autobuilder machine, > > which is generally watched upon much closer than a random developer's > > machine. > > In the mean time, however, that situation has changed. It is now no > > Well, one could argue that basically nothing has changed. The threatening was > always there and always be there. And from time to time there's is and will be > a compromise. Nothing changed. Well, yes, there's a difference. As I pointed out previously, it makes not much sense trying to implement strict access controls from a small number of systems if OTOH, there's a much larger group of people for which the controls aren't relevant. If, however, without the large group of people, the to-be-closed-down group is sufficiently small (check), well-known (check), and the result if a break-in is potentially extremely harmful (check; ftp-master is, uh, ftp-master), then it suddenly makes a *lot* more sense to implement such access controls. > You can't totally secure an open project with thousands of developers. No, but you can secure a mirror archive network by restricting access to its main server, which is what James is doing. That's reasonable; hundreds of thousands of users depend on the integrity of our archive network every day; we can't risk, not even remotely, for the archive to be compromised. [...] -- Wouter Verhelst Debian GNU/Linux -- http://www.debian.org Nederlandstalige Linux-documentatie -- http://nl.linux.org "Stop breathing down my neck." "My breathing is merely a simulation." "So is my neck, stop it anyway!" -- Voyager's EMH versus the Prometheus' EMH, stardate 51462.
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