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Bekijk Volledige Versie : stick with "anonymous" or "authenticated" when describing



Jonathan G. Lampe
22/12/04, 22:25
At 11:27 AM 12/22/2004, Adam Shostack wrote:
>I've long advocated 'credentialed' to refer to attacks where a user of
>the system can execute the attack, and 'anonymous' or
>'non-credentialed' to refer to refer to attacks on servers, such as
>httpd, ftpd, or named.

The word "authenticated" already has the meaning of what I think you were
trying to express with "credentialed"; "authenticated" means that a user
has already presented credentials of some kind (username, password, PIN,
key, cert, token, etc.), that those credentials were accepted and that the
user enjoyed a different level of privilege than mere "anonymous" users.

The term "credentialed" suggests that a user has been issued credentials of
some kind, but that he/she may or may not have used them to authenticate to
a restricted resource. (The term "credentialed" is similar to the word
"ticketed".)

So...I'd stick with "anonymous" or "authenticated" when describing attacks
on servers.

-jgl

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Steven M. Christey
23/12/04, 21:05
"Jonathan G. Lampe" <jonathan.lampe () standardnetworks ! com> said:

>So...I'd stick with "anonymous" or "authenticated" [instead of
>"credentialed"] when describing attacks on servers.

Based on what I've seen emerging in researcher reports and
vulnerability databases/notification services, the terms
"authenticated user" and "unauthenticated attacker" are emerging with
increasing regularity, especially in "remote" cases (i.e. "remote
authenticated user" and "remote unauthenticated attacker.") CVE
descriptions are moving in this direction.

The "pre-authentication" term is also emerging for cases in which the
software requires authentication, but the vulnerability appears before
that authentication has taken place. Obviously not all software uses
authentication, so this isn't exactly the same thing as
"unauthenticated" attacks.

- Steve