Re: How effective is a router as a firewall?
From: Leythos (void_at_nowhere.com)
Date: 10/28/03
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Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 19:39:28 GMT
In article <Hvwnb.208$u14.162@newssvr22.news.prodigy.com>,
alec@nospam.com says...
[snip]
> individuals are occassionally prone to lapses in judgment. Your statements
> are demeaning because you are in essence insinuating that *you* know
> precisely what you are doing and that Wolfgang and others do not. I'm sorry,
> but such statements, in my mind, make you look the greater fool.
Nope, never said they don't know what they are doing, and didn't imply
it either. What I said what that I trust my ability to know what I'm
doing and when I'm doing it. If you recall, I specifically said that I
will connect as a "user" when necessary.
> It is called the "principle of least privilege". Code should always, to
> every extent practicable, be executed in a context with just enough
> privilege to get the job done and no more. This goes for "trusted"
Already understood, never argued that point anywhere.
> applications from well known vendors as well as for "untrusted" applications
> that you may have just downloaded from some dodgy internet site. Those
> "trusted" applications may have unpatched vulnerabilities that expose your
> machine to attacks that can utilize your elevated security context. In fact,
> Microsoft is quite guilty of writing far too many of their services and
> server applications with the assumption of the use of a privileged context.
And if you have a controlled environment where you know what can get
in/out you could safely run a fully unpatched (security patches) Windows
system without ever having any problems.
> Certainly, security is always a trade-off... largely that trade-off is at
> the cost of ease-of-use. However, most modern operating systems provide
> relatively convenient mechanisms for allowing administrators to routinely
> use lower privileged accounts and only temporarily raise access to higher
> privileges. Linx/unix offers 'su' and Win2K/XP offer 'runas'.
I was already aware of this, this was never in question. It comes down
to the working environment. I consider the subnet I'm currently posting
this from to be secure - I control the firewall, the IDS, the Anti-Virus
settings, the applications, and all of the users systems permissions. I
feel confidant that I can run as a member of the domain admins group
from this subnet without any problem. There are 4 more subnets in this
office that I would not run as a domain admin from.
> It really is
> not that difficult to utilize your system in such a manner where you raise
> privileges only when you need to. Of course, having said that, I must
> concede that many legacy Windows apps were written and designed in the days
> of Win9x where the concepts of privileges and user contexts was essentially
> foreign. These apps often do not play nice in setups where they don't have
> full control over the machine. Thankfully, such apps are getting to be fewer
> and fewer in number due to obsolence.
Now we're getting to the meat of it. How are you going to educate the
zillions of home computer users on doing this? In most cases they can't
even spell Administrator let alone know what to do about privileges.
Most users don't have a clue, so you have to find a way to allow them to
work and at the same time protect your network - it doesn't start at the
desktop, it starts at the entry points for data.
> You may continue to run in fully privileged accounts, and you may, quite
> rightly, never experience any security problems or issues whatsoever as a
> consequence. However, I for one still do not believe that this is a wise or
> advisable approach in the vast majority of situations.
And I would agree that for most people, running as an administrator
account member is very unwise. Don't get this in the wrong context, I'm
not saying I'm lucky or some super expert, I'm saying that my
environment is controlled, known, and secure, so I can run as a member
of the administrators group from this system without significant fear in
compromising the system. At the same time, I've been in offices of
fortune 500 companies that allowed a simple Word macro-virus to shut
them down in less than 40 minutes (17 offices in the US were brought
down because of a lax security plan) and one lame contractor.
I understand your issue with this, but I don't see where you are
providing a workable solution to the problem that faces your average
computer user - telling them to not run as an administrator takes more
work that just typing it and does not really tell them anything about
the question.
-- -- spamfree999@rrohio.com (Remove 999 to reply to me)
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