[mythtv-users] Has anyone configured a "semi"-diskless frontend?

[Adam Felson]

Why would you have to worry so about security on your LAN?
Are you worries somebody is going to break into your house, connect
physically to lan, and spoof a mythbox and watch tv? :-p


On Fri, 2005-01-07 at 01:00 -0800, Brad Templeton wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 07, 2005 at 08:36:43AM -0000, mythtv-users at fastdruid.co.uk wrote:
> > Better than that why not do it by MAC address recognition, first time a
> > machine
> > pops up the backend asks if you want to allow it, if you say yes that
> > MAC/IP
> > is stored. Next time it pops up it will go oh yes I grant access to that
> > one.
> 
> Unfortunately the MAC address is totally insecure.  You really want
> the remote computer to have some way of remembering something to
> authenticate itself.   It would be nice, actually, if there were an
> official way to make use of some of the unusued flash space the bios
> sits in, for example.
> 
> There are some tricks you can play, which are not super secure but
> much better than the MAC.   For example, you can calculate a signature
> of sorts for the hardware of the machine in some fashion (pulling out
> non-public things like identifiers of all the non-removable PNP hardware,
> anything with serial numbers etc.)  It doesn't have to be portable, as
> long as you can get something non-guessable that will remain the same
> boot to boot.  (If it changes you have to re-auth.)
> 
> Then you have a secret number you can use to prove you're the same
> machine that authenticated last time.
> 
> Short of all this, the user can type in a password of course.  And that's
> actually not that dreadful really.   Client boots, user enters password,
> and you're up.   No IP addresses or any of that stuff.   This is
> easy to implement and modestly secure against random attempts to
> screw up your systems.
> 
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-- 
Adam Felson <a.f.6 at pobox.com>