--On December 10, 2009 2:11:31 PM -0600 Kevin Wilcox
<[email protected]> wrote:
2009/12/10 Anton Shterenlikht <[email protected]>:
I was just stressed after being forced by him
to explain why I wanted firewall exceptions
for two ports to my FreeBSD portscluster nodes.
I explained the reasons and that was settled.
Anton, I don't know about the UK, Great Britain or England, but in US
Universities, this is fairly common. It just serves as a sanity check
for the many, many requests central IT tends to get regarding allowing
ingress traffic for faculty/staff machines, and it gives the firewall
guys documentation that such-and-such machine should be receiving
inbound traffic on specific ports.
I can confirm this, at least for us. Our practice is to only open ports
for thoroughly justified business reasons, document thoroughly and audit
regularly.
The Uni is, of course,
addicted to Microsoft, but having realised all
the problems with that, lately the policy has
been to deny (!) MS users admin access to their
own desktops. The situation is just ridiculous -
if a MS user wants to install a piece of software
on their PC he/she has to ask for permission,
and then wait until some computer officer would
come and do install for them.
Again, I don't know about the UK, Great Britain or England, but in the
US this is also quite common, at least with regards to University
owned hardware. The first responsibility is to protect the network and
existing services. Sadly, many groups fail to provide the next step,
that being a relatively quick, easy way to have approved software
installed for users, and a method for having non-approved software
scrutinised and either approved or rejected.
This is less common at the universities that I'm familiar with. I think
it becomes less common the larger and/or older a university is. The trend
is to move in this direction, but we're also moving toward much stronger
compliance controls. There are things about your computer's configuration
and maintenance that you will no longer get to decide, regardless of the
OS you run - password strength and length, for example, the ability to
create local accounts, and other such things.
These things aren't being done to harass or irritate users but because of
long and bitter experience with a lack of controls. Our view is, if your
computer is going to connect on our network it must be configured in
certain ways and behave "normally" or you won't get a connection.
Also recently, well.. about a year ago, no
host (!) could be accessed from outside the
Uni firewall. Special exception has to be
obtained even for ssh. There is only one dedicated
sun server which accepts only ssh. The users
are supposed to dial to this frontend server
first, and from there to hosts on the local net.
Again, quite common. Most Universities here do not provide
public-facing IP addresses without some sort of application and
approval process. For example, we have a handful of machines that are
public facing but most of our hardware sits inside site-only networks.
To access those machines you either have to be on-campus or you have
to connect via VPN (and yes, we support Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris,
*BSD).
This mirrors our practice. You don't get a public address without being
thoroughly vetted *and* agreeing to the terms of use, unscheduled and
unannounced monitoring and immediate disconnection without prior notice if
a problem is detected.
Having an SSH proxy isn't an entirely bad idea, though I can see where
performance may be hindered.
I had to fight a long battle, well.. I had
some support from other academics, to have
a linux class in my Faculty. Here the
opposition wasn't so much security, as
"why would any undegraduate need linux",
as if MS solutions are a pinnacle of human thought.
That's a pretty fair question and one that I hope you would have asked
yourself before you made the push for the class.
And from I understand it's going to get worse.
Apparently the IT services are drawing up
plans to completely forbid use of "non-autorized"
OS. I imagine fbsd will not be authorized.
So I'm anticipating another battle already.
Does this extend to computers used for academic research, student
owned computers being used on campus, etc?
Perhaps it's because we're conditioned to think this way but a lot of
us at universities in the US see a lot of this as being commonplace
and to *not* do them is generally considered bad security practice.
This last part is surprising to me. Not only are we not Windows-centric,
the very idea of not allowing a diversity of OSes is foreign to our
operation. We are a heavy Solaris shop (as are many universities), have a
good amount of Suse and RHEL and far less Windows servers exposed to the
Internet. At the desktop users may install whatever they want, so long as
it's maintained properly (which we audit routinely) and used in an
acceptable manner (which you agree to when you get an account.) We have
just about every OS you can imagine, including some you wouldn't believe
still exist.
I'm starting to wonder if the security manager really said what Anton
claims he said, or Anton is filtering his perceptions through the anger he
feels at being restricted in his ability to operate freely. If the latter
is the case, you'd better adjust to it. It's the world of the future.
You can do whatever you want at home, but on the corporate network you
either follow the rules or lose your access.
Paul Schmehl, If it isn't already
obvious, my opinions are my own
and not those of my employer.
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