On Wed, Mar 16, 2005 at 06:49:05PM -0500, Danny wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 23:35:56 +0000, Kris Kennaway <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 16, 2005 at 06:06:07PM -0500, Danny wrote:
> > > With regards to: http://www.daemonology.net/portsnap/
> > >
> > > Should I be concerned about my servers that use CVSup?  Do the FreeBSD
> > > guru's refuse to use CVSup, or is this overkill?
> > 
> > Depends on your threat model, i.e. what are you afraid of?
> 
> I will respond to your question with a question to hopefully answer
> both of our questions. :)
> 
> When is the last time a FreeBSD CVSup server was compromised - if ever?
> 
> > If it's something that cvsup doesn't protect against, and portsnap does, 
> > then
> > use the latter.
> 
> Assuming Portsnap protects and/or overcomes against all of CVSup's
> "limitations":
> 
> "# CVSup is insecure. The protocol uses no encryption or signing, and
> any attacker who can intercept the connection can insert arbitrary
> data into the tree you are updating.
> # CVSup isn't end-to-end. Related to the previous point, this means
> that anyone who can compromise a CVSup mirror can feed arbitrary data
> to the people who are using that mirror.
> # CVSup isn't designed for frequent small updates. While CVSup is very
> good at distributing CVS trees, and is very efficient for updating a
> tree which has been significantly changed (eg, by a month or more of
> commits), it has transmits a list of all the files in the tree, which
> makes it quite inefficient if only a few files have changed.
> # CVSup uses a custom protocol. This can cause problems for people
> behind firewalls -- outgoing connections on port 5999 need to be
> permitted -- and it needs a heavyweight server (cvsupd)."
> 
> I don't know, it's just that if the FreeBSD org and handbook recommend
> using CVSup, it's can't be that bad?

I don't much about portsnap, but if your looking for a secure way to do
updates, plain old cvs through an ssh connection is very secure
assuming you verified the fingerprint before hand.  This will protect
against everything mentioned above minus the cvs service itself being
compromised, but then again, no protocol is safe against that.

> 
> Thanks Kris,
> 
> ...D
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