At 07:14 PM 6/6/2004, you wrote:
On the SSH/SSL front: IMHO these technologies give a false sense of security. Sniffing cleartext management sessions is a concern, yes, but actual incidents where it occurs, especially within your own network infrastructure, are vanishingly rare compared to the commonplace compromise of individual hosts. Creating a secure link between hosts is wasted effort at best if you can't trust the host at the other end of that link.
Agreed. I really truly don't see the problem with plaintext telnet management of routers. We have access-lists on vty 0 15 specifying which networks can even connect. We can't connect except for from a trusted internal management network and I control all the routers and circuits in the path. If someone is in the middle of one of my circuits doing some type of dump of the data to disk, they are probably the NSA or CIA, and I've got much bigger problems. Can someone please provide a situation where doing this can lead to compromise or any type of problem at all? I just don't see it. However, I see people having unpatched servers running without proper ACLs every day and this is rarely discussed and as Stephen Sprunk points out, lot of people here on nanog don't apply bogon filters or even source filter their customers - and this doesn't require a feature set upgrade to IOS. (All of which we do, btw) So I'm still not convinced that SSL on routers is needed. Nice, sure, but needed? no. Please convince me otherwise if you feel this is such a hugely pressing need or at least explain your position.
R
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