A fine piece of work. The ideas expressed in this paper should scare the hell out of everyone who uses NFS for any serious applications, which for a fact includes most banks and all investment banks and brokage houses. In this particular area I KNOW what is at risk. Again, I congratulate the authors on a first-class effort.

The real issue is not NFS itself but RPC and the interface layer between the system and these layered services. In fact holes also exist in RLOGIN, REXEC, and RSH (ports 512,513, and 514). Cant tell you how many secure systems we have broken because of these little goodies. The real issue is that by itself TCP/IP has no security to speak of, and more importantly the concept of secure messaging goes much farther than just keeping prying eye's off the data contained within. For instance Commerce Models require synchonization of process events in order to manage OLTP properly. TCP/IP in and of itself is really unusable for these tasks without something like the ISIS messageing protocol and process control 1interface above the protocol stack. All in all it's a complex nut to crack. Todd cheers,

paul

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From owner-cypherpunks@toad.com Tue Oct 10 03:15:15 1995 From: gauthier@espresso.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Paul_A Gauthier) To: cypherpunks@toad.com, bugtraq@crimelab.com Cc: gauthier@cs.Berkeley.EDU, brewer@cs.Berkeley.EDU, iang@cs.Berkeley.EDU, daw@cs.Berkeley.EDU, fur@netscape.com Subject: Basic Flaws in Internet Security and Commerce Date: Mon, 09 Oct 1995 14:26:06 -0700 Sender: owner-cypherpunks@toad.com Content-Length: 10235

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