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Sophos Endpoint Updates over https

faygate

For the past 3 or 4 years we have posed the question to Sophos as to why we cannot update our clients out in the field using a web CID over https. So far this has failed to materialise, which I found bizarre for a company that deals with security. We are a large University and to ensure we our students and staff are protected from viruses and malware, they are allowed to install Sophos on their computers. Now as we like to ensure that we adhere to our licence our users must update Sophos using their University credentials.

As our University credentials are being used to grant access to more and more sensitive systems, this is becoming a real security issue and we are not happy about this credentials being passed over effectively in plain text! Of course we'd have the overhead of the encryption on our webservers, but I'm happy to take that hit and the servers can handle it.

Does anyway else have this requirement for updates via https? I can't believe we are the only ones.

My understanding is that this is now being discussed as a feature request, but it would be good to have some more people on board. Please post your comments below.

Regards, Richard

:226


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  • 0
    DetlevRackow wrote:
    ...

    Even if the update service were to use SSL, any attacker would be able to bomb the server with https-Requests with "Administrator" or "JSmith" as a user-account, and would in time disable the account.

    That's actually a very good and perfectly valid point.  However, the same risk is also present with any AD authenticating system available publicly over the web, such as OWA (correct me if I'm wrong here, but I've seen a few accounts get locked out when the user has tried to log into OWA with a forgotten password).  At least with OWA the connection is secure so there's less risk of the password being compromised.

    Out of curiosity, what would the official Sophos response be if I did assign a generic username and password (non-AD) to the download location and we ended up exceeding our licence for home users who didn't uninstall the software or distributed the credentials without our knowledge?

    Thanks

    :3032
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  • 0
    DetlevRackow wrote:
    ...

    Even if the update service were to use SSL, any attacker would be able to bomb the server with https-Requests with "Administrator" or "JSmith" as a user-account, and would in time disable the account.

    That's actually a very good and perfectly valid point.  However, the same risk is also present with any AD authenticating system available publicly over the web, such as OWA (correct me if I'm wrong here, but I've seen a few accounts get locked out when the user has tried to log into OWA with a forgotten password).  At least with OWA the connection is secure so there's less risk of the password being compromised.

    Out of curiosity, what would the official Sophos response be if I did assign a generic username and password (non-AD) to the download location and we ended up exceeding our licence for home users who didn't uninstall the software or distributed the credentials without our knowledge?

    Thanks

    :3032
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