Hi,
There have been several interesting solutions offered here to address the
Web server hacking problem. The ones I've seen seem to focus on either
making the content static, or on providing secure methods of updating the
content from a more secured machine further within the organization.
This may work well enough for organizations which are providing the
content in a "one way" method: _from_ the organization _to_ the surfers.
However, this doesn't appear to be the model for the future development
of the Web/Internet. From marketing blabs and magazine articles, it
appears that the largest driver of bi-directional content exchange is
going to be electronic transactions. For those companies which aren't
planning on doing this anytime soon, I still think that they would want
to get "feedback" (aka - demographics research) from people visiting
their site. I, personally, would like to get a transaction record
onto a non-volatile media pretty quickly.
I'd say that setting up a Web server on the Internet is not something
that you can do, and then just walk away from. You must accept the
responsibility of constantly maintaining security on exposed systems
like these. I can't offer anything more than to say that the
traditional security methods, which have also been mentioned here,
are probably the best.
Thanks,
Chris Lonvick
Cisco Systems
Consulting Engineering
Houston, TX, USA
+1-713-778-5663
At 02:59 PM 1/1/97 +0100, Thomas Leitner wrote:
>
>On Tue, 31 Dec 1996, Paul Ferguson wrote:
>
>> Frankly, I think the suggestion of using non-writable media (ie. CD-ROMs)
>> is rather unpractical. Most sufficiently interesting web sites contain
>> ever-changing & constantly updated information, such as news, various
>> daily features, etc.
>>
>> Not a practical solution.
>
>O.K. If you want to be really secure and still updateable, do this:
>
>1.) Use two mirrored disks. One is mounted read-only one is mounted
> read/write. The two disks can contain not only the WEB data but
> the whole operating system as well. As someone already noted
> before: Linux (and I'm sure other Unixes as well) can be setup
> to run from an RO media.
>
>2.) When updates are required: Mount the second mirror disk r/w,
> do the update and reboot from the second mirror disk which is
> now mounted read-only. If the system is setup properly,
> the reboot time and thus the outage time can be kept quite low.
>
>3.) When the system comes up, mount the first disk RW and apply
> the updates as well to keep the disk contents in sync.
>
>If the outage during the update is unacceptable what about using
>two mirror machines: One standby and RW for updates and one
>on-line running RO. After the update, machines could swap their
>functions immediately. Sure: This would require some fancy IP
>address setup.
>
>Tom
>
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