Solaris Telnet 0-day vulnerability

philos writes "According to SANS ISC, there's a vulnerability in Solaris 10 and 11 telnet that allows anyone to remotely connect as any account, including root, without authentication. Remote access can be gained with nothing more than a telnet client. More information and a Snort signature can be found at riosec.com. Worse, this is almost identical to a bug in AIX and Linux rlogin from way back in 1994."

Comments

Why is this a big deal?

[nettdata]

Who the hell even THINKS about enabling telnet on any box these days?

Re:Why is this a big deal?

[mi]

If ssh on your cisco boxes is slow, you either have serious network problems [...]

Most likely, the reverse DNS is misconfigured. This is the number one reason for ssh-login delays. Maybe, the nameservers initially put into the router's configuration are no longer reachable due to subsequent "hardening". Or, maybe, they went away and were replaced long ago — without anybody telling the routers. Nothing else on a router uses DNS usually, so this problem affects only ssh-daemon and gets blamed on it...

The daemon could, of course, be a little bit smarter and not try to do a reverse DNS, when there are no hostname-based authorization rules in the first place... But that's a minor bug compared to reverse DNS being dysfunctional.

Re:Why is this a big deal?

[arth1]

Vendor support for ssh is one factor. Many companies have aversions to installing software unless it's backed by FULL support from the vendor. Having to go to a third party, like F-Secure, to get vendor support is often undesirable, and unfortunately, security can lose to support requirements, service level agreements and response time. Even worse is that there's multiple and sometimes incompatible versions of SSH out there - what may come with one system isn't guaranteed to work with another.
Can you get the OS vendor to jump and have a man there within 30 minutes to fix it if a supported OS function doesn't work? Yes. Can you get the OS vendor to jump and have a man there within 30 minutes if OpenSSH doesn't work? No. Sometimes it's as simple as that, unfortunately.

That said, don't think that I believe telnet is a good substitute for ssh, but often, and especially in a turtled environment (hard on the outside, soft on the inside) where five nines are more important than internal security, it may still be a better choice, at least until all the OS vendors provide fully supported (and compatible!) versions of SSH.

Re:Why is this a big deal?

[bugnuts]

Security best practices are the same whether you're talking about securing your home network or a military network No. It's not. The only thing those have in common is considering what you are protecting, and how much risk you wish to take versus the convenience granted. The specifics are immaterial.

The OP is right, he knows his risks and has deemed it acceptable. You and others, having no idea of the risk, deem it unacceptable and are the ignorant ones.

not an excuse

[otacon]

"Nobody should be using it anyways" is not an excuse. If it is included, it should be held to the same standard as every other application. In some legacy cases I'm sure telnet is of some use. But regardless the fact that it has a practical use or not is irrelevant.