nanog mailing list archives

Re: secure router access


From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry () piermont com>
Date: Thu, 28 May 1998 09:05:07 -0400


Curtis Villamizar writes:
With ssh, the ssh key identity can't be revoked.  Instead you need to
find all .slogin files for all the accounts on all the machines and
routers and make sure they aren't listed under an assigned name or a
pseudoname they chose and didn't tell you about (an impossible task),
plus insure that any machine (like their home machine) that they have
access to doesn't appear in any .shosts files.

A script can do that without much effort.

Given 1,000 machines (for example) which sounds harder to do?

If you have 1,000 machines, neither is particularly more difficult
than the other. With 1,000 machines, you need a database driven
management system anyway. If you are trying to manually maintain
accounts on 1,000 hosts, you've done something terribly wrong.

Personally, I prefer SSH for a bunch of reasons, but I'll admit that
at this scale, K5 with 3DES would do as good a job. 1DES K4 is *not*
sufficiently secure, though, IMHO.

Perry


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