US House Passes P2P Ban On Federal Networks

An anonymous reader writes "Recently, the US House of Representatives passed a bill in an attempt to ban peer-to-peer file-sharing applications on federal computers and networks. Similar bills have been proposed before, apparently in response to confidential government documents being found on LimeWire. The text of the bill, however, provides a very broad definition of 'peer-to-peer file sharing software,' and may extend to more than they intend (SMB? LDAP?)."

Comments

How will the government botnets run!?!?

[Orga]

I think this will greatly hinder our offensive capabilities in a cyberwar

Re:How will the government botnets run!?!?

[Ron Bennett]

Nah, the government will just contract that stuff out to the likes of Halliburton and Xe (formerly Blackwater).

Ron

Whitelist, not blacklist!

[LoudMusic]

This is an issue of what can be installed on federal computers? I believe there should be a list of what is allowed and everything else is disallowed. And NO ONE has admin access to their computer.

Come on people - federal security! Why the hell are they running MS OSes anyway?

Re:Whitelist, not blacklist!

[Sir_Lewk]

Clearly there are only two options:

• Use a Microsoft OS.
• Write your own in Ada.

Re:Whitelist, not blacklist!

[YrWrstNtmr]

I believe there should be a list of what is allowed and everything else is disallowed.

That's pretty much the way it is. They actually have a pretty secure MS ecosystem. Between DISA, NIST and USAF and Microsoft, they've come up with the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC) (which is an outgrowth of the USAF 'Standard Desktop Computer' (SDC)).

Various security settings, GPO's, etc. If you use a standard FDCC image, it is pretty well locked down, AND can be administered from anywhere. Having said that...'locked down' as much as XP or Vista can be. But the VAST majority of users do not need much more than Office and the base OS. No real need for 8 zillion extra little tools, which may or may not have their own vuln's.
But there is quite a lot on the approved list. Installed on a case by case eval. Wireshark or Firefox, for example. It is up to each department to further refine that list. For instance, the USAF (mostly) bans Firefox in favor of IE7.

Why the hell are they running MS OSes anyway?

Changing the US fed govt infrastructure from MS to 'something else', Linux for example, will take an extremely long time, and may well end up worse than it is now. Take the Munich example and multiply the problems by 500. For better or worse, an org of that size can't just switch.

Re:Whitelist, not blacklist!

[stonewallred]

I went to your link, then went to the FAQ, which sent me back to the patch notes, with a link available for the FAQs, which took me back to the patch notes. If that is the best the federal government can do, I am brushing up on my chinese, russian and arabic, because we are all fucked.

Perfectly reasonable

[H0p313ss]

If you read the bill it ONLY refers to OPEN-NETWORK p2p which they define as

The term ‘open-network’, with respect to software, means a network in which--
(A) access is granted freely, without limitation or restriction; or
(B) there are little or no security measures in place.

What part of this is unreasonable in any controlled environment? Can you think of any corporation that would allow such a thing?

I wouldn't even let my kids run such a thing.

N.B. This clearly does not cover things bittorrent since you have to explicitly publish individual files to it.