Re: sshd permits logon using disabled user?

[Bill Stewart <bstewart@iname.com>]

On Fri, Jan 25, 2019 at 10:48 AM Stephen Paul Carrier
<carrier@berkeley.edu> wrote:

> There are different paths to access and to completely disable the account
> you need to close all of them.  There are many reasons to disable some
> paths without disabling all paths and converting the switch that can
> disable one path to a switch that will disable all paths will break
> some setups and be less flexible.  (As Stefan Baur is pointing out
> effectively.)
>
> To disable ssh logins really, instead of changing the way Cygwin works
> for everyone, you could do what UNIX/Linux admins do, something like
> moving the user .ssh folder to .ssh.disabled.

This is a very problematic view from a Windows system management perspective.

I respectfully (and strongly) disagree, for at least the following reasons:

* Cygwin runs on Windows, and as such should respect Windows security.
It is very unexpected, from a Windows administration perspective, to
have a disabled account and still be able to log onto it.

* Proper system management/security mitigation is made quite complex
with this requirement. Imagine even a small Windows domain: I have to
scan 20000 machines in my domain to find out if they're running ssh,
troll through the disks to find ssh config files, find out the key
file names, rename them, etc. This is quite a bit harder to do than
just disabling accounts, which in many organizations is handled by an
automated process.

Regards,

Bill

--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple