In the profound words of Cedric Blancher:
>
> On Thu, 12 Apr 2001 21:39:37 Spookah . wrote:
> > My question is, what is YOUR definition of a backdoor as apposed to a
> > security problem. Because an administrator account with no password
> > accessably by the DSLAM sure as hell sounds like a backdoor to me.
>
> A backdoor is for me a hidden access to an equipment for malicious
> purposes, such as spying pruposes.
I think you're using a different definition of "back door" than
most other people I've heard use... A back door by no means needs
to be intended for malicious purposes... In fact, I'd say the vast
majority of them certainly are NOT intended for such; they're usually
intended for administrative access use, and such...
To quote a bit from the Jargon File's definition of "back door"
("http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/back-door.html"):
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back door n.
[common] A hole in the security of a system deliberately left in place
by designers or maintainers. The motivation for such holes is not always
sinister; some operating systems, for example, come out of the box with
privileged accounts intended for use by field service technicians or the
vendor's maintenance programmers. Syn. trap door; may also be called a
`wormhole'.
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--
||========================================================================||
|| Rob Seace || URL || rasat_private ||
|| AKA: Agrajag || http://www.magrathea.com/~ras/ || robat_private ||
||========================================================================||
"The secret of healthy hitchhiking is to eat junk food." - TRATEOTU
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Apr 14 2001 - 18:34:16 PDT