On 01/16/2015 05:54 AM, Paul Eggleton wrote:
On Friday 16 January 2015 02:05:27 Fan, Xin wrote:
There will always be differences in how people expect software to be
configured for whatever target and application they are building for,
hence why we make it fairly easy to adjust the configuration.
Actually, I had the same opinion with you at the beginning.
But in last December, the ntp published 4 serious
vulnerabilities(CVE-2014-9293, CVE-2014-9294,CVE-2014-9295,CVE-2014-9296).
So I think even the display a clock function, it should also be protected
by openssl for the safety connection.
I'm not sure this follows. Correct me if I'm wrong, but SSL doesn't actually
prevent me as an unauthorised user from making a connection - it just ensures
that when I connect to a server that firstly the data sent over the connection
is encrypted, and furthermore that the connection is directly to the server I
think it is and not someone else masquerading as that server.
Though this is the common mode of operation, ssl also permits client
authentication through certificates, so the server knows that the client
is who it says it is. I generally run public-facing restricted access
web servers this way, in addition to using HTTP authentication. I don't
know but would assume ntp would support the same capability through
configuration files if ssl is enabled in the build.
I doubt the number of people in the world that would configure ntp that
way is very large, though. As long as it's available through
PACKAGECONFIG (and it is) I'm not convinced changing the default is
critical, but it's probably not a big deal either unless the added
dependencies are a burden for somebody's small-footprint installation.
(In which case they could override PACKAGECONFIG. That's what I love
about Yocto.)
Peter
This would mean
that for example any buffer overflows such as the ones in the vulnerabilities
you point to would still be accessible and potentially exploitable even if the
connection were only available as encrypted using SSL, at least as far as I
can tell.
And I find more packages in Yocto which also use the openssl as the
default option, so I think ntp also should set the openssl option as default
setting.
In a lot of other cases SSL is on by default because it really makes sense;
for example it's common to want to fetch files from https servers so in the
general case you would want curl to be built with SSL support by default. I'm
not sure the same can be said of ntp. Again, I'm happy to be corrected though.
Cheers,
Paul
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