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Army Dumps NT as Web Server, Moves to Mac
kootch writes "This sounded too funny to believe, but I think it's true. The US Army, after being the victim of a script baby and having their web pages vandalized, has moved their site from an NT box to a Mac box running WebStar as their server software. Don't believe me? Go here!"
(Disclaimer: Apple folks, I have a moral obligation to tweak macs. I grew up with an Apple IIgs.)
Ah, yes. There's nothing like a brick wall to prevent someone from breaking the lock.
MacOS actually gets some bonuses from its, uh, quaintly anachronistic operating system tendancies. (This is not a flame. I think it's cute to tell an application how much memory it gets. See disclaimer. Tweak. Tweak.) For example, the fact that the entire OS is really built to communicate over Appletalk instead of TCP/IP means there's absolutely *nothing* open by default for abuse on the general Internet.
Those who remember these kind of things will note that *the* definitive, original WinNuke was a bug in the TCP handling of an "Out Of Band" packet sent to port 139 on a Windows box. Open door. Boom.
As much as I love Linux, there are more open ports in your standard issue distribution than you're likely to find in an average brothel. Unix in general is hooked into TCP/IP addiction on a practically native level.
The speed on the mac might not be great. The stability probably won't be perfect, but who knows. With much less embedded functionality, there's Just Less To Break.
"We here at the US Army know that the most secure computer is the one that isn't plugged in. We use the next best thing."
Yours Truly,
Dan "Must Never Post When He's This Tired" Kaminsky
DoxPara "Will Have No Memory Of This Post" Research
http://haveasenseofhumor.www.doxpara.com
Once you pull the pin, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend.
the article says:
yes, the macOS has no 'root' or shell-type access, and, by itself, is arguably one of the most secure platforms available, if only for the same reason that is is one of the most virus-immune - very few hackers, crackers, or virus writers use macs (despite all the movies like 'hackers' and 'the net')
and, by that same token, any web server just serving up http and ftp is fairly secure. adding on all the other services, and opening up ports to who-knows-what is asking for trouble. simpler is better. and a mac as a webserver is a very simple solution.
since when has the w3c been in the business of security surveys? oh well.. they're right on a few accounts, but may not be totally up to speed on the software they're talking about. the mailing lists are/have been alive with reports and fixes for security holes in open transport, os8, webstar, and all the various plugins that come along with it.
if i were choosing the most secure server for the mac, however, would have gone with webten, an apache-based port by tenon, over webstar (if one were to go with a commercial package). it's fast, reliable, and simple - no fluff. the latest issue of webstar folds in all kinds of services that are unnecessary, and have proven to be security risks in the past. my sites are running on webstar 3, but that's because of how easy it is to add new domains and administer/monitor.
the press-release tells us the mac 'does not allow remote logins'. well, if you open it up via appleshare or install timbuktu it does. even if you don't, and you stick entirely to the webstar package, you get lasso (database), a pop/smtp mail server, proxy server, ftp server, and remote admin tools by default.
i expect the army has disabled lasso - as it has been shown to be a gaping hole in previous, standalone releases - and probably use a dedicated mail server, proxy, etc., but the main webstar server cannot be administered without either a separate admin tool (which can be run locally or remotely via tcp/ip) or web-based admin, whose security is, in my experience, pretty easy to get around.
all that aside, the mac makes an excellent web server. pare down the software to the essentials, give it plenty of RAM and a steady power supply, and it should be happy and stay that way for a good while.
as for apple's PR picking this up, i think they would prefer it if the army had chosen osX server with apache, since os8.x is not really a server product.
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
without ever having to worry about someone getting root.
Yeah, you don't have to worry about someone getting root, because once they're on the box, they *are* root. They can delete the system folder, install software, anything. I bet there's not sandbox for CGI either - one buffer overrun and you can trash the operating system.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Most computers are more than powerfull enough to flood a T1. I am sure the of has plenty of horespower.
As for security. Most of the apple web servers use Apples fairly old ACL per directory for file shareing. The Permission are secure and have stood up to time. As far as connecting to the files system from remote if you use another Mac it does indeed encrypt the passwd.
The Mac has very limited functionality for networking built in on MacOS, this makes it more secure. Apple fixed the TCP/IP large packet bug back in 1995. The current IP stack is fairly fast and based on the System V steam type TCP/IP stack.
Most of the Apple web site security issues have been from Filemaker integration. Filemaker is a GUI DB for MacOS (it has issues).
One of the other advantages to not having any cosole based applications, no concept of standard in and standard out, is if you do run an application on the Mac it doesn't do anything usefull. Also MacOS doesn't have any sensible kind of IPC or RPC support so even if you can compromise a single application it is extremly difficult to get to the operating system or another application.
If you did use Perl, your perl scripts need to be safe. But again on a Mac, there is no plain text file that you could grab security information.
Open BSD could be made equally secure, but it would take lots of customization and intelligence about it, the Mac is VERY high security for default configuration. Though flexibility is an issue with Macs.
"His[Mankind's] heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque." -Satan "Letters From Earth" Mar
Macs make secure web servers because they don't have anything to exploit. How the hell are you going to exploit something that has NOTHING listening to the network except an HTTPD listening to port 80, delivering a static page. About the only thing you could try is a DoS attack. *NIX boxen usually have 50 daemons running, and often crazy protocols like NIS that make them wide open to attack. WebStar is a solid HTTPD, too. Despite the comments here about Mac OS stability, the fact of the matter is that most of the problems with it are due to lack of memory protection. If you are running a solid application that doesn't have memory leaks and wild hair pointers, it can be very stable. I ran a Mac OS server with AppleShare on a UPS that had an uptime of 3 YEARS. That is stabilty as good as you can get on any system. In reality no server is any better than the stability of the network applications it runs and the OS, and the fact of the matter is if you are careful you can find good Mac OS versions and good applications. Mac hardware was generally better engineered than the PC equivalent (lack of cost pressure I guess) so you had that going for you too. One writer here mentioned Mac OS on a 7100. THAT IS A VERY BAD COMBINATION. The 7100 is a kludge, being the first PPC Mac pasted onto an old Nubus architecture. The Mac OS of the same period had a very crufty emulator as well, and the pair really were unstable. But not all Macs are that way....
AFAIK if they are using Webstar they must be running MacOS 8.x, not MacOS X server as some previous comments suggested.
In the June 1999 issue of MacTech Magazine there was an interview with Chuck Shotton. He is the guy who created, in 93, the first Mac http server MacHTTP, which later became Webstar.
In the interview he explains how they made Webstar into a high-performance web server. To summarize:
a) use of caching to avoid hitting on the dog slow MacOS filesystem
b) optimizations to have the right balance between I/O time and calculation/processing time
c) taking advantage of the MacOS thread manager and the fact the MacOS 8.x is NOT a premptive multitasked OS.
c) will sounds odd to most; what they do is that since the app has control over the premption (rather than the OS) they use that advantage to minimize the number of context switches, etc. i.e. they have their own highly tuned and specific scheduler rather than relying on the generic scheduler of the OS.
This is pretty cool on a dedicated MacOS box that do just web server.
As for MacOS crashing, my router is running MacOS 8.6, it has been up & running nicely since I last booted it, one month ago; it has never crashed so far.
Note: I'm not saying MacOS is the best, fatest and most stable OS out there; just that for some applications a Mac can be stable and fast plenty.
As far as security go, since you can't remotely login on a Mac and since there is no shell, you don't have any risk of someone exploiting some buffer overflow bug or remotely using the box. (Note tho that you could add softwares to control you Mac remotely, like Timbuktu or VNC, but then you are taking risks, as on any other OS with such means.)
Just my $0.02
Janus