Hi,
On 2022-04-08 06:19, Julian H. Stacey wrote:
Or, more likely: is that the same password the individual uses to
log into their system? Or to access their e-mail? Or (hopefully not)
their bank account?
That is why it is actually better to use no authentication, than to
allow weak authentication.
It would be unfitting & intolerant to deny weak authentication when
we are ignorant of local environments.
We don't know people's local subnets, firewalls, VPNs, local user
community of colleagues & co-residents & family, & their skill
levels (both admins to configure, & users who might [or not] have
skills to sniff packets, & what devices with sniffer apps might or
not be able to connect to subnets.
In ignorance of user environments, we should not force others to strong
or none by removing weak.. Just offer suggestions & examples at install.
Cheers,
My personal opinion is that we should provide the best protection for
our users that is reasonable whilst not significantly increasing the
costs of setup for users.
We do fairly regularly get users asking questions about how to set up
the saned/net backend scenario and it is not as straightforward as it
might perhaps be.
I do think that this is a useful discussion however.
In the current computing world, we are moving to a no-trust default,
whether or not individual users believe that their network has much of a
threat profile.
Modern attacks are increasingly clever viral payloads that attempt to
spread themselves throughout internal network nodes.
I don't personally believe it likely that there are threats out there
actively looking at the SANE net protocol though. Perhaps I am wrong
about that. I don't know.
If we can provide an alternative to what is currently supported that
provides secure authentication then I believe that would be a worthwhile
thing.
We should consider backwards compatibility though with a view to
eventually removing the current regime once a new, better method had
been established.
If someone were keen to take that on.
We should also be considerate of any other implementations of the net
protocol to see if there would be problems there. I'm thinking of some
of the other language implementations.
I do know that there is at least a Dart implementation: we had some
discussion on GitLab about it some time ago. There may be others.
Cheers,
Ralph
