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Re: Is ident secure?



On Fri, Aug 31, 2001 at 11:44:42AM +0200, Martin F Krafft wrote:
> 
> okay, i give you that, but still, i have yet to encounter one sensibly
> good use for ident. any shots?

i already posted it in another message.

> > why not? in most cases they will know anyway because most services
> > either must run as root, or not, if its a nonroot service what the
> > actual username is really isn't useful nor important.
> 
> well, while my named runs may run as user bind and my proftpd as user
> proftpd and my apache as www-data, there are *plenty* of people who
> run these things as root. it's nice to determine first whether named
> is running as root before cracking it...

rubbish, if the admin is incompetent enough to be running these things
as root he will have a cracked box regardless of whether identd is
running or not.  

and all the zillions of bind exploit attempts i get, they are NEVER
preceeded by ident queries.  your line of reasoning here is completly
flawed. 

> that's one of the many other parts of being security-concious...

there is such a thing as going overboard with irrlevant minutia.  my
isp recently thought it would be a good idea to make /home unreadable
by all its users for `security' reasons, of course this makes
everyones shell puke when it cannot properly ascertain the pwd so they
seem to have changed thier minds on this.  (that and cat /etc/passwd
will reveal everything ls -l /home would)

-- 
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/

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