Secure Networking in the Sun Environment.
Bradley J. Taylor, David A. Goldberg · 1986
We present an authentication system that greatly improves the security of Sun's network environment. The system uses DES encryption and public key cryptography to authenticate both users and machines in the network. The system is general enough to be used by other UNIX+ and non--UNIX systems. Introduction Sun's Remote Procedure Call (RPC) mechanism has proved to be a very powerful primitive for building network services. The most well--known of these services is the Network File System (NFS), a service that provides transparent file--sharing between heterogenous machine architectures and operating systems. The NFS is not without its shortcomings, however. Currently, an NFS server authenticates a file request by authenticating the machine making the request, not the user. On a system accessing files with the NFS, it is a simple matter of running the su command to impersonate the rightful owner of the file. But the security weaknesses of the NFS are nothing new. The familiar command rlo...