🚀 go-pugleaf

ivory@e7sa.crd.ge.com (John Ivory) writes:

>A site I've been working with is considering obtaining a UUCP e-mail feed
>so that they can e-mail to/fro the world.  Myself and several others have
>been strongly encouraging this.  This is new territory for the company
>though, so they are cautious.  They are concerned that they are opening
>themselves up to some level of danger, point to the Morris worm of a couple
>years ago as an example.

>These are open minded and intelligent people, but they want more than just
>my word that they really are not that much in danger.  What documents can
>I bring down from the net to help validate my argument?  My spin is that
>their greatest danger is themselves; bringing in and casually running things.

The documentation for Taylor UUCP has a section on UUCP security.  It
is, naturally, oriented toward Taylor UUCP, but is fairly applicable
to other packages.

Basically, UUCP does not provide much security for the users of a
system against users of the same system (for example, there are often
ways for one user to look at any files that another user is receiving
via uucp).  Mail is usually fairly secure.

Assuming that that is not an issue (users at the site mostly trust
one another), then UUCP can be very secure.  It is obviously better
for them to dial out, rather than to accept phone calls, because if
another system can dial in then they must protect all their accounts
from intruders.  However, assuming they do that, or assuming that they
always place the call, UUCP can be configured to eliminate any
possibility of remote access to their files.  In fact, it is normally
configured this way by default.

Ian Taylor

In article <1iknikINN51@tweedledumb.cygnus.com> ian@cygnus.com (Ian Lance Taylor) writes:
>ivory@e7sa.crd.ge.com (John Ivory) writes:
>....
>Assuming that that is not an issue (users at the site mostly trust
>one another), then UUCP can be very secure.  It is obviously better
>for them to dial out, rather than to accept phone calls, because if
>another system can dial in then they must protect all their accounts
>from intruders.  However, assuming they do that, or assuming that they
>always place the call, UUCP can be configured to eliminate any
>possibility of remote access to their files.  In fact, it is normally
>configured this way by default.
A related experience - I finally got my management to agree to uucp when I
acquainted them with password-protected callback modems (a caller has to enter
a password and is then called back, at a phone number preset by the manager
of the host system).
Many or most uucp implemntations provide a similar feature in software.
-- 
Kind regards,			Elmar Folba
				Hamburg, Germany
				elmar@gulasch.hanse.de

This depends strongly on the type of UUCP that you are using.

- V2 (comes with L.sys and so on) is worst.
- HDB (comes with Systems file and so on) is better.
- Taylor (style of config files is configurable) is best.

An important metric for UUCP security is whether or not the programs
use the shell to spawn commands. Taylor is the only one that does not
invoke the shell at all. You can find it at any GNU archive site.

	Wietse