On Thu, Nov 29, 2001 at 04:09:53AM +0100, martin f krafft wrote: > * Dimitri Maziuk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2001.11.28 10:44:02-0600]: > > Bull. Give me one reason why it sucks. It's the way of giving them > > anonymous cvs access without too much hassle. Or do you believe ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > > that letting them have *a private key* is bad because it's called > > "private"? It's just a word, you know... > > i know. but there are two problems: one, you lose trust in a single > user means you have to redistribute new private keys. and two - it's a > proven fact that when i have my own password or my own key, i am a > little more protective off it. aside, with a single key you can't > determine who leaked the key in case of a third party entry, *and* you > still have the problem of distribution.
...all of which is not a detriment to a key which is being used to establish _anonymous_ access. If it was intended for authenticated access by a trusted user or users, then you're absolutely correct. Dmitri, however, is suggesting that a specific key pair be designated for anonymous access, which suggests that distribution of the private key to any and all interested third parties with a minimum of accountability is not only acceptable, but probably also desirable. > most importantly, you > are actively working against the concept behind public key > encruyption. Not true. The concept behind encryption (PK or otherwise) is to establish a secure method of communication. Dmitri is simply pointing out that ssh normally uses a one-to-many (one person can access accounts on many machines) model but, by distributing the private key and securing the public key, you can reverse that to allow essentially anonymous many-to-one access instead. > > Yes, and you also have one to one key->user map, so the setup is not > > anonymous. Which may not be a good thing. > > so then give me a way to figure out which identity logged in to ssh if > they all log in as one user? You don't need to. That's sort of the point of anonymous access. -- When we reduce our own liberties to stop terrorism, the terrorists have already won. - reverius Innocence is no protection when governments go bad. - Tom Swiss