Re: MonkeyShell: using XML-RPC for access to a remote shell

On Sun, 2004-10-10 at 22:38 -0400, Abe Usher wrote:
> Security pundits have been warning about the dangers implicit with Web
> services for years. A good starting point for understanding the security
> issues related to Web services can be found at:
> http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid26_gci872720,00.html
The 'Monkey Shell' looks like a good demonstration, but it could have
just as easily been implemented using the normal CGI interface, or
straight HTTP requests. As things like httptunnel have done.

I don't understand why the 'New' web services, with requests and
responses encoded as XML over HTTP, are considered more insecure than
the 'old' web services with requests and responses encoded directly in
HTML, or in custom formats. The functionality is the same, only the
transport encoding is different.

I can see other problems with the 'new' services, with increased network
load, harder parsing for small devices, and the inevitable security
problems introduced with any newly written software. But I don't see how
changing the actual request/response encoding magically makes it any
less secure?


Mr Wagner in the linked article says that "the danger is that almost
anything can come over a web service connection". But "almost anything"
can also come over a straight HTTP connection. What's the difference?


_______________________________________________
Nessus mailing list
Nessus@list.nessus.org
http://mail.nessus.org/mailman/listinfo/nessus