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- Hacking into a vendor account
- Possible consequences
- loss or corruption of vendor data
- use of storage for illicit purposes
- interruption of vendor data deliveries
- load on "u2" server (currently wain006)
- Possible mitigations
- configure vsftpd to recognize only certain IP addresses to log in
- vendors must agree with the level of security and the risk
- monitor disk usage with ganglia and look for abnormalities
- configure vsftpd for secure userid/pwd transfer, e.g., tls
- Possible consequences
- Hacking into the vsftp server
- Is this likely? This server is generally considered "very secure" as its name suggests. No hard data on this claim.
- Hacking into the lsstlnx VM
- Independent of vsftp and, therefore, no different from other VMs at SLAC with externally visible ports. Server restricts login to a small set of authorized SLAC users.
Suggestions from the Cyber Security Group
- Ask vendors to send MD5 checksum via a separate channel than FTP. Response: ask them to send it via email in their announcement message
- Employ and IP filter (or virtual IP addresses), preferred would be to add this filter to the perimeter router. Response: request sent to net-admin
Why Existing FTP Service is Unacceptable
- Non-anonymous (s)FTP requires a SLAC unix account and that has been deemed unacceptable by LSST project team
- Anonymous FTP server suffers from several shortcomings:
- The server software cannot restart an interrupted data transfer
- The AFS-backed store is possibly not scalable to the hundreds of GB needed
- The 3-day dwell period is too risky for the data
- The AFS permissions combined with the 3-day swell dwell do not allow for the type of permissions that would allow for a convincing separation between the two vendor's data
- The dropbox paradigm does not allow for vendors to manage its data once at SLAC, i.e., to replace faulty data files.
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