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"Designed to be insecure" is probably unfair to the designers of IPMI. Security was just not as big a concern as it is today.
by majewsky 8y ago
"Designed to be insecure" is probably unfair to the designers of IPMI. Security was just not as big a concern as it is today.
- pjc50 8y agoThis is only really valid for protocols or products designed before the Morris worm of 1988. Anything designed beyond 2000 has no excuse for not thinking about internet security.
- vel0city 8y agoWell, IPMI isn't supposed to be exposed to the internet. Best practices have you running your BMC's on a completely separate, highly locked down administrative network.
- parliament32 8y agoWell yes, typically you'd 1) configure IPMI to use the dedicated port, 2) put those ports into a VLAN with no outgoing internet access. But since this is BMC, what's stopping it from just using your management or production port to fire off its secret phone-homes and whatnot?
- greglindahl 8y agoBest practice would be for the BMC to not have access to the regular network ports when it has a dedicated network jack. All the ones I've looked at don't have any kind of physical interlock or switch, it's a software interlock. Now even a hardware interlock could be subverted, but that's harder than sticking code in the bmc firmware, which does tend to get updated during the life of a server.
- dsl 8y agoI did a security audit on a company that had a setup similar to this. After popping an internet facing web server, I was able to compromise the IPMI system and use the management network to bounce around to any server in the enterprise completely bypassing all the firewalls and segmentation on the production network. Management networks need rack level isolation.
- village-idiot 8y agoComputer security as a field and area of concern is significantly older than IPMI.