[announce] NYC*BUG: Wednesday on Public Key sudo

[NYC*BUG Announcements]

August 06, 2008
Public Key sudo

6:30pm, Suspenders Restaurant
http://www.suspendersbar.com/location.php

Two tools which have become the norm in Linux- and Unix-based 
environments are SSH for secure communications, and sudo for performing 
administrative tasks. These are independent programs with substantially 
different purposes, but they are often used in conjunction. In this 
talk, I describe a flaw in their interaction, and then present our 
solution called public-key sudo.

Public-key sudo is an extension to the sudo authentication mechanism 
which allows for public key authentication using the SSH public key 
framework. I describe our implementation of a generic SSH authentication 
module and the sudo modifications required to use this module.

Bio

Matthew Burnside is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science department 
at Columbia University, in New York. He works for Professor Angelos 
Keromytis in the Network Security Lab (http://nsl.cs.columbia.edu/). He 
received his B.A and M.Eng from MIT in 2000, and 2002, respectively. His 
research interests are in network anonymity, trust management, and 
enterprise-scale policy enforcement.