Re: Security and SunPCi cards

From: Greg Williamson (n120476@phaedrus.national.com.au)
Date: 08/21/01 

Message-Id: <200108210053.f7L0r7v25803@phaedrus.national.com.au>
Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2001 10:53:07 +1000 (EST)
From: Greg Williamson <n120476@phaedrus.national.com.au>
Subject: Re: Security and SunPCi cards
To: focus-sun@securityfocus.com, lbogar@gemini.oscs.montana.edu

>I don't have alot of experience with the windows world, but I have some
>clients interested in running Windows through a SunPCi card. My question
>is what security risks are there with running the Windows on this
>dedicated card to the rest of the system? Also, will this windows
>interface be directly accessible from other machines. I have not yet
>loaded the Windows operating system on the card, since I wanted to explore
>the risks I would undertake and also explore how I might minimize these
>risks.

Basically, the Sun PCI card is a fully configured PC (minus disk and power
supply) on one card. It has a dedicated CPU, RAM, serial and parallel ports,
but shares disk, CD, monitor (optionally) and mouse. It creates a datafile
which it uses for its local disk. It also has its own NIC, although you can run
the networking through the Sun machine instead. You need an external router to
communicate between the machines if you use the virtual networking.

There are practically no risks (that aren't inherent in having 2 machines) in
this situation. The only exception could be the CDROM which is shared. It
could be used as a vector, but that would suggest someone has physical access
anyway, so all bets are off.

If you use the virtual networking there may a possibility to crash the TCP
stack, but I think it's encapsulated traffic (hence the need for an external
router) so that would be unlikely.

I'm currently running NT on one, and have had no obvious problems.

Greg.

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