On 26/11/2012, at 9:01 PM, Makarius <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Sun, 25 Nov 2012, Gerwin Klein wrote:
>
>> On 20/11/2012, at 11:23 PM, Makarius <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> There is this recurrent game to have the isatest user do many manual ssh 
>>> logins to update known_hosts.  Getting tired of it, I just did some reading 
>>> of man ssh_config and some googling.  This resulted the following 
>>> ~isatest/.ssh/config:
>>>
>>> Host *
>>> #see 
>>> http://linuxcommando.blogspot.fr/2008/10/how-to-disable-ssh-host-key-checking.html
>>> StrictHostKeyChecking no
>>> UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null
>>>
>>> Maybe it helps in other situations, too.  Or maybe there is an ssh expert 
>>> saying that this is really really bad.
>>
>> ssh does check these keys for a reason, it is now easy for another host to 
>> pretend to be one of the servers isatest wants to access. On the other hand, 
>> it's unclear what an attacker would gain from having isatest run a large 
>> isabelle session. There are easier ways to do that ;-)
>
> Do these attacks also work from the free net outside TUM?

Unclear to me. You would probably have to spoof DNS on a fairly far-reaching 
level to exploit this from outside TUM. My guess would be that this is a lot 
harder than actually getting to the server itself. But I'm not really an ssh 
expert.


> The reasoning (or rather hope) behind the above was that for doing real 
> non-sense you would have to be on the local network at TUM.  So it is 
> basically a switch back towards the old-fashioned ways of rsh.

I'm fine with that part. I mainly don't want to get the warning emails for each 
session. Maybe we should just leave off the line with /dev/null.


> BTW, the local network is totally insecure if accessed from inside. There are 
> many ways to do non-sense, but we better don't explain that here.

Better not ;-)

Cheers,
Gerwin


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