UUCP-NNTP

Last time we had a look on the FTP service. Today we see little known but widely used NNTP and UUCP protocols.

Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)

NNTP is a protocol used for moving around Usenet News, a bulletin board-like on the Internet, with a variety of articles in many subjects. Grouped into newsgroups, the articles are selected by their content.

When setting up news to be accessed through your Web server, you will use NNTP to link news to your site. You will have to decide where your news server will be located in order to preserve security. Assuming that you have or will be installing a firewall at your site, you have the option to place NNTP at the firewall machine, the bastion host. Or you can have NNTP outside of your protected network, if your Web server is placed outside of it.

However, to secure news links is not something difficult to do. The major issue you will face is on controlling the private news your internal users may create. Chances are your users will be exchanging sensitive information among each other, but if external users have access to these groups, then you may have a breach of confidentiality situation to deal with. NNTP can help you to control access to these private groups.

The proxing capabilities of NNTP can help you to filter the Usenet news postings by receiving and storing it than forwarding it to a server you have designated.

NNTP is a TCP-based service with store-and-forward characteristics protocol. For the most part, NNTP is a very secure protocol, carrying a very secure service. The reason being is that all the incoming connections to your site will be coming from a licit connection from a news feed location.

Regardless where you place your firewall, make sure to have the news being feed straight from your news provider to your news server. You will be able to do this very easily by using packet filtering or, in case you have a firewall, through a proxy server.

Although NNTP is a fairly secure protocol and easy installation, the following are few recommendations you should keep in mind when configuring news at your Web site:

• Do not allow the news server to reside in your firewall (bastion host) machine. News are very disk storage demanding, and you don't want to have your firewall machine crashing do to lack of disk space!
• Make sure to disable automated group creation. It can present a risk to your site as if groups are not created properly it could enable (specially
  The copyright of the article UUCP-NNTP in Internet Security is owned by Mayur Kamat. Permission to republish UUCP-NNTP in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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