Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives

Re: Back on topic.... Re: [SECURITY] Universitycredentials used by third parties


From: David Gillett <gillettdavid () FHDA EDU>
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 09:25:52 -0700

  I haven't looked closely at Blackberry -- perhaps I need to?  The
scenarios I'm aware of are:

1.  User sets their institution email to forward to a remote address -- in
this case their Blackberry address.  No exposure of credentials unless they
want to reply (or originate) on the device and have those messages go
through our outbound servers....

2.  User configures personal device to download messages from their
institution inbox.

  Does either of these actually involve sharing the user's credentials with
the *service*, beyond their device?  I had assumed not, but now I'm not so
sure....

David Gillett


-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Porter [mailto:mike () UDEL EDU]
Sent: Wednesday, August 25, 2010 08:55
To: SECURITY () listserv educause edu
Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Back on topic.... Re: [SECURITY]
Universitycredentials used by third parties

On Wed, 25 Aug 2010, Jesse Thompson wrote:

On 08/24/2010 11:08 AM, Joel Rosenblatt wrote:
Just to thorough another thought into this mix, does anyone prevent
their students (or other users) from turning over their credentials
to Gmail or Blackberry?

We see lots of authenticated logins from these services - and if I
were to come down hard on this Ultrinsic using our sharing of
password policy (which we do have) I'm sure that this would amount to
having to change our policy to - you can't share your credentials -
except with (gmail, Blackberry, etc.)

I really hate inconsistent enforcement of policies, so it's either
change the policy or cut off everyone.

+1

Our help desk created end-user instructions for IMAP-syncing email
accounts with Gmail, despite the fact that it completely violates password
policy.
They did this specifically because they get flooded with "how do I
save my email" requests when we deactivate email accounts, but other
users take advantage of it as well.

Yet, when we propose the idea of officially embracing this
Gmail-IMAP-sync option as a more reliable alternative to forwarding  -
essentially treating Gmail the same as any other IMAP client - the
idea is immediately shot down because it violates password policy.

What was the violation?  The problem that users woud need to store a
password, likely the regular one, at gmail in order to use imap?

We ended up with a convoluted system to avoid some of those issues.


Mike

Mike Porter
Systems Programmer V
IT/NSS
University of Delaware


Jesse
(an email admin at Wisconsin)



-
Mike Porter
PGP Fingerprint: F4 AE E1 9F 67 F7 DA EA  2F D2 37 F3 99 ED D1 C2


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