Shodor Network Security Protocols

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Email Readers:

Email readers require some sort of authentication to prove you are who you say you are. A standard way of doing this is to send plain text passwords over the internet. This is dangerous, as people listening in can get your username and password, pretend to be you, and log in to our machines. There are far more security holes on a computer once you are in, so at that point they may be able to exploit it and gain root access to our machine.

For this reason, we will not support an email authentication scheme which uses plain text passwords over the internet.

We support APOP authentication. APOP stores an alternate email password on the server. The password that is passed over the internet is not the same one that is used to log in to the machine. It is still possible for someone to snoop your email password, however, as long as it is different from your login password, they cannot break in and use your account to do damage.

Alternatively, you can log in using SSH and read email using pine, elm, or unix mail. Provided you have not used any insecure methods to create your SSH connection, reading your email by opening an SSH connection and using pine, elm, or unix mail is fully encrypted.

For APOP email readers, We recommend Eudora. Follow this link for configuration instructions for Eudora.

Known email readers that allow APOP

• Eudora
• Outlook Express
• FetchMail