From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Apr 23 11: 7:59 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from scaup.prod.itd.earthlink.net (scaup.mail.pas.earthlink.net [207.217.120.49]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5FDB137B41A; Tue, 23 Apr 2002 11:07:51 -0700 (PDT) Received: from pool0547.cvx22-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net ([209.179.200.37] helo=mindspring.com) by scaup.prod.itd.earthlink.net with esmtp (Exim 3.33 #2) id 1704hh-0005bD-00; Tue, 23 Apr 2002 11:07:50 -0700 Message-ID: <3CC5A2D9.D9FB84A3@mindspring.com> Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2002 11:07:21 -0700 From: Terry Lambert X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en]C-CCK-MCD {Sony} (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Robert Watson Cc: Greg 'groggy' Lehey , Jordan Hubbard , Oscar Bonilla , Anthony Schneider , Mike Meyer , hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Security through obscurity? (was: ssh + compiled-in SKEY support considered harmful?) References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Robert Watson wrote: > A more conservative default configuration results in a material > improvement in system security. I really don't think there's any way to fully protect a security-unconscious user, as if they had spent the time to learn what was necessary, and chosen the right settings for their site. Nothing can replace a system administrator who knows which end is up. I think that trying to do this is doomed to failure, in that it will engender a false sense of security which is, in many cases, unwarranted and dangerous. This is particularly true for FreeBSD, where the first thing anyone ever does with the system is install packages/ports which may themselves have undocumented security vulnerabilities (or even documented ones for which the documentation is ignored). This is particularly true when the system is running X11, as the system *never* *only* runs X11, but instead has all sorts of clients installed, as well, and generally a significant set of unaudited software, such as KDE, which you can attack via CORBA much easier than you could ever hope to directly attack an X11 server, whose defaults already do not permit remote connections through intrinsic access controls in the server ("xhost", et. al.). -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message