SSH LocalForward

[aeneas () sesuadra org (Kristof Van Damme)]

Hi,

I bumped into a weird 'feature' of ssh 1.2.20. When I run:

ssh -L 80:remotehost:80 remotehost

as a normal user I get the expected error:

Privileged ports can only be forwarded by root.


But when I put:

LocalForward    80      remotehost:80

in my ~/.ssh/config file and connect to the remote host I don't get the
error and port 80 is opened on the localhost (an httpd was not running,
the port must be available). When I connect to it I get a normal
redirection to remotehost:80 over the secure channel. This means however
that a non-root user is able to open privileged ports on the localhost and
redirect them. Is this normal? I checked it on Linux and Solaris.

Aeneas
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|Kristof Van Damme                                                   |
|System Administrator                                                |
|e-mail: aeneas () sesuadra org                                         |
|voice: +32 9 3558603                                                |
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