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Date:      Wed, 24 Mar 1999 11:51:25 -0800
From:      Mike Thompson <miket@dnai.com>
To:        freebsd-security@freebsd.org
Subject:   Kerberos vs SSH
Message-ID:  <4.1.19990324113601.0097aeb0@mail.dnai.com>

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We are configuring a series of web servers running FreeBSD 2.2.8
for a new Internet service.  To implement our service we need
to provide a mechanism for secure communication between the 
servers using an rsh-like facility.

One method of doing this would be to run SSH on each server for
encrypted/authenticated communication.  However, the downsides
of this are that there wouldn't be a central administration
facility for managing authentication information (unless we
create one), ssh has a relatively high CPU overhead to encrypt 
all communications and we would like to avoid paying the substantial
license fees for SSH across a large number of servers.

An alternative would be to run a rsh in combination with a
Kerberos server to centrally administer authentication 
information between each server.  Communication between the
servers would take place behind a router to prevent 
interception of the unencoded packets.  We would also use
IPFW to restrict communication with rsh as further protection
against hacking.

Does anyone here have an opinion as to whether rsh and Kerberos
can be used in this manner for efficient and secure communication
between web servers running a distributed application?

Ideally, we want to keep the cost per server as low as possible
with regards to licensing fees, but we also don't want to compromise
on security.

Thanks,

Mike Thompson




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