Yesterday, Jerry Callen gleaned this insight:
> - Unix has had Kerberos available for years, but hardly anyone uses it.
Do you honestly expect widespread adoption of Kerberos on W2k? I don't.
Security is a pain, and a LOT of people don't take it seriously. So
there's no difference. Windows is just about a decade behind is all.
> - By virtue of building it into W2K, MS will succeed in bringing Kerberos
> to the masses.
They'll have it, but that doesn't mean they'll USE it...
> For years we Unix dweebs have jeered at the fact that Windoze isn't a "real"
> operating system, isn't multi-user, it has no security, etc. etc. In the
> meantime, were we busy deploying Kerberos, ssh, AFS and all the other stuff
> that would have kept Unix way out in front of Windoze WRT security? (Well,
> maybe ssh has become common.)
I refrained from commenting when it was brought up in another thread, but
I've heard that AFS has problems when you stress it. I think it may have
been Ted T'so when he presented to us. I don't know that I'd trust it.
> Don't get me wrong, I *like* Unix, especially on servers. But from a
> security perspective, I think it's fair to say that Unix, as practiced
> by most sites, has stood still, while MS has improved.
I think the security model of Unix is inherently more sound... it's not
Unix that is insecure, but most installations of it. If you carefully
engineer your environment at the onset, you can make it pretty secure.
It really does come down to how much time/money (i.e. salaries) you're
willing to put into it. Providing a secure environment with Unix that
meets your needs, given that everyone's needs are different, is HARD. But
with Windows, it's just impossible.
But in addition to that, lots of people have been pouring over the code to
find insecure code and fix it. I don't think Unix has been standing
still... I think it has been fixing broken implementations of (generally)
fairly well-thought out designs.
Windows only looks like it's moving faster because it had so much farther
to go to catch up....
I will say that while I consider SMB to be poorly designed and
implemented, the intended security model (meaning per-user authentication
for resource access) is better than what we have for NFS. If someone
could design a better protocol which incorporated that feature for unix,
I'd be tickled pink... :)
> Remember when NT & W98 started insisting on encrypted passwords for
> SMB shares? What was the response of most sites running Samba? Edit
> the registry to turn off encrypted passwords! Granted, Samba
> eventually added support for encrypted passwords, and the reason this
> was a problem is because MS doesn't publish protocols, which is why
> anti-trust action is so important. Still...
That's not fair, and doesn't make your point. Samba was developed to
maintain compatibility with Windows' brokenness. Because they design the
protocol and don't release the specs, Samba can't help but be behind.
There's no way around it.
> This gets me wondering: maybe one *weakness* of the open source model
> is that once a more-or-less acceptable solution to some reasonably
> hard problem (like a distributed file system) appears, it gets
> accepted as the "standard" solution, and unless the problem itself is
> inherently interesting, nobody bothers trying to come up with
> something better.
Well, someone already commented on the rapid gain in prevelance of NFS and
why it happened. It's only natural that it would have become the
standard. That is not, however, a reason why we can't make something
better.
Whatever someone comes up with, it should incorporate at least these
features:
* it should actually work :)
* should have per-user authentication mechanisms
* should have host-based authentication for non-sensitive data
* should have optional, but recommended encryption capabilities
* should be optimized for speed, naturally.
So, all you kernel/fs geniuses out there, get to work!
--
PGP/GPG Public key at http://cerberus.ne.mediaone.net/~derek/pubkey.txt
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Derek D. Martin | Unix/Linux Geek
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