[Info-vax] DECnet use in today's world, was: Re: Tangent about DECnet versions.

[Simon Clubley]

On 2018-05-19, Grant Taylor <gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net> wrote:
>
> I'm curious, does anybody have any idea how prevalent any of the 
> following DECnet phases are these days?  Are there any production shops 
> still using any version of DECnet?  Or is it relegated to hobbyists?
>
> DECnet Phase I / II / III

Hopefully, these are now obsolete.

I think all the PDP-11 operating systems got DECnet Phase IV, but did
the PDP-10 operating systems ever convert to DECnet Phase IV or were
they stuck on DECnet Phase III ?

> DECnet Phase IV

Unfortunately, based on a recent discussion, DECnet Phase IV is alive
and well, even though it's a horrible protocol from a security viewpoint
to be running in a modern network environment.

BTW, DECnet Phase IV proxies are even more insecure in some ways than
the plain text passwords which DECnet Phase IV uses because there are
no shared secrets between the nodes.

All a rogue node has to do is to change its DECnet address to that
of a trusted node and the proxy will work. There's even a warning about
this somewhere in the VMS manuals.

And while everyone is worried about the security of TCP/IP, DECnet Phase IV
just sits there silently waiting to receive malformed packets from an
attacker.

One of the things that worries me about DECnet Phase IV is we don't
know if there are any horrible security issues in the stack itself
because no-one (at the moment anyway) is interested in probing it
and in the old days when there was interest, you couldn't probe
a network stack in the ways that you can now.

The DECnet Phase IV stack could be secure against malformed packets or
it could be a ticking timebomb waiting to go off. We simply don't know.

> DECnet/OSI or DECnet-Plus
>

I don't have a feeling for this one. I know there's some use but
I don't have a feeling for how widely it is deployed.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
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