[Toolserver-l] The Norwegian toolserver

Fahad Sadah fahadsadah at googlemail.com
Sat Aug 1 15:46:33 UTC 2009


>
> - - critical vulnerabilities are frequently discovered in the MIT Kerberos
>  software, while SSH has had very few serious security issues, and none
>  recently.


I didn't know that, tbh. I've used krb5 somewhere else for a while now, and
no break-ins.

- - Kerberos only works with password authentication, meaning anyone can log
> into
>  any account if they know the password; for example, because someone
>  accidentally typed their password into IRC, or wrote it down somewhere.
>  strong password policy requires restrictions on password contents (length,
>  character types, etc) that encourage users to write them down (especially
>  when you have a lot of non-technical users, like us)
>

This is the main problem. However "a lot of non-technical users, like us" is
untrue.


> - - conversely, it is very difficult to accidentally paste a private key
>  somewhere, and it's impossible to guess.  even if it was leaked, the user
>  would also have to leak the passphrase.
>

I doubt many people here use passphrases

Kerberos was just an example, btw. I was just suggesting the idea of using a
centralized auth system.

Fahad Sadah
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/toolserver-l/attachments/20090801/5ddc64fd/attachment.htm 


More information about the Toolserver-l mailing list