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rlogin security compromise implicaion

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by securityfussy 1 view

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Hi

I am not a regular user of UNIX. I have only used it for a few days, in fact. I would like to know what are the security implications(rather loop holes) associated with using a rlogin over TCP/IP ?

TIA

5 replies

by joematus

Rlogin is considered potentially dangerous because it uses the .rhosts file for authentication. Passwords and the session itself is transmitted in the clear. If you are going to run it, use TCP Wrappers so that you will only allow access by trusted hosts. An even better solution would be to run SSH, which encrypts your session.

Hope this helps....

by securityfussy

Thanks for the answer. Although it gave me pointers, I would appreciate if the following is also clarified.

"Passwords and the session itself is transmitted in the clear".

Does this mean that it is possible to intercept the password easily and by whom and how?

by joematus

Passwords and session are in the clear. Sun comes with sniffer software called snoop. Run "snoop -o snoop.file". Then fire up a rlogin session to your server. You'll see that the session will get captured in the file. Run "snoop -i snoop.file -x0" and it will show you the entire session. It's an eyeopener the first time you see this. Anyone can put a sniffer on your network. There's even software that is designed to sniff passwords off the wire:
http://www.monkey.org/~dugsong/dsniff/
A lot of folks use SSH just to get the sessions encrypted.

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