NFS over ssh

[John Bowman]

Secure NFS (SNFS) via SSH tunneling of UDP datagrams, as suggested in the
SSH FAQ, has now been implemented and is available for download from
http://www.math.ualberta.ca/imaging/snfs/. This is an enhancement of the
original sec_rpc package developed by Holger Trapp.

* Tunneling via SSH increases the security of the connection and prevents
IP spoofing.

* SNFS has been tested on Linux i386 and alpha platforms under RedHat 6.2.

* No changes to the kernel or existing daemons are required.

* On a high-end workstation, tunneling of large files results in only a slight
degradation in speed (eg. 4MB/s instead of 5MB/s).

* Detailed configuration instructions are contained in the file NFS/README.NFS.

Here is a question for this group: so far, of the 4 UDP services, only
mountd and nfsd are being tunneled through ssh.  In sec_rpc-1.0,
portmap/rpcbind and the lock manager are not being tunneled, because
the system is configured so that only local connections to the portmap are
allowed anyway (via /etc/hosts.allow). Are there any security concerns here?

Thanks,

-- John Bowman
University of Alberta
http://www.math.ualberta.ca/~bowman