A secure NFS environment?
A lot of organizations do not realise the danger of NFS untill they have been intruded by hostile crackers. This article would give a short description of most NFS realted problems and means to avoid it. Since I mostly use solaris, I'll try to stick to Solaris examples in this paper. Problems: Un-authenticated NFS mounts. Many sys-admins including me, have setup uncontrolled NFS shares on solaris boxes. There might be many excuses for this. My popular excuse is that I was just testing it, or that I was asked to do that by someone else. No matter what the excuse is, its tough to recover from a hostile attack morally if its ever misused. As a matter of policy shares should have restricted hosts, especially if it has read-write enabled. No NFS mounts should be allowed from hosts which are accessable from the Internet, and one should avoid critical write enabled NFS mounts in a non-secure zone. Problems: home directories Its is a popular to use NFS for home directories, especially for