| ▲ | trebligdivad 21 hours ago |
| Why are people still using telnet across the internet in this century?
Was this _all_ attack traffic? (OK, I know one ancient talker that uses it - but on a very non-standard port so a port 23 block wouldn't be relevant) |
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| ▲ | jaredsohn 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| To watch Star Wars in ASCII. telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhcf6tc2jeQ (Remember hearing about this a long time ago (from some searching I think it was in 1999 via Slashdot) and verified some instance of it still exists/works.) |
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| ▲ | mmooss 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Connection failed
Maybe we should give the kind person who hosts it a break. Try it out tomorrow. (Yes, I should have thought of that before I tried.) | | |
| ▲ | accrual 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | It might be the telnet filtering in action. The host responds to ping but I get nothing back on TCP/23, not even a reset. |
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| ▲ | cbarrick 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | ~~IIRC the blinkenlights telnet movies have been offline for a few years already.~~ | | |
| ▲ | jaredsohn 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | I connected a few times today to the IPv4 one. Have had no problems myself. |
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| ▲ | 0xbadcafebee 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Telnet is used in legacy, IoT, embedded, and low-level industrial hardware. It's also intentionally enabled on devices where automation was written for telnet and it wasn't easy to switch to ssh. If you investigate most commercial uses of ssh, the security is disabled or ignored. Nobody verifies host keys, and with automation where hosts cycle, you basically have to disable verification as there's no easy way around the host keys constantly changing. Without host key verification, there's kinda no point to the rest. Even assuming the host keys were verified, the popular ssh conventions are to use either long-lived static keys (and almost nobody puts a password on theirs), or a password. Very few people use SSH with 2FA, and almost no-one uses ephemeral keys (OIDC) or certificates (which many people screw up). So in terms of how people actually use it, SSH is one of the least secure transport methods. You'd be much more secure by using telnet over an HTTPS websocket with OAuth for login. |
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| ▲ | taftster 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | How do you automate, for example, "HTTPS over websocket with OAuth", without providing some kind of hard-coded, static or otherwise persistent authentication credentials to the calling system in some form (either certificate based auth, OAuth credentials, etc.)? The problem with IoT and embedded secrets isn't really a solved problem, from what I can tell. I'm not sure that OAuth exactly solves the problem here. Though all your comments about SSH (especially host verification) holds true. Just honestly trying to understand the possible solution space to the IoT problem and automated (non-human) authorization. | | |
| ▲ | emmelaich 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | The manufacturer should at least supply certificates, and it could be up to you to ignore or use. It's not much but it's something. |
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| ▲ | watermelon0 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Unless you manage to leak your private host/client SSH keys, this is close to being as secure as it gets. I'd say that HTTPS (or TLS in general) is more problematic, since you need to trust numerous root CAs in machine/browser store. Sure, you can use certificate pinning, but that has the same issues as SSH host key verification. | | |
| ▲ | 0xbadcafebee 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | CA compromise is very rare and difficult. There are much easier attacks on TLS than that (notably, attacking insecure validation methods; the problem isn't that CAs aren't secure, it's that validation methods and their dependencies are insecure). Besides, the CAs for TLS only covers transport security; authentication+authorization would be handled securely through OIDC, using temporary sessions and not exposing the true credential, often combined with 2FA. Even you successfully attack a TLS server, two factors, and an active session, it only works once; you have to keep pulling it off to remain inside. Compare that to malware that just copies a developer's ssh private key off the disk (again, almost nobody ever password protects theirs). This just happened recently on a massive scale with the npm attacks. Or intercepts the first connection from a client host and, again, because nobody ever validates keys, injects a false host key, and now they're pwnd indefinitely. Or, again, companies that do not strictly validate host keys, meaning immediate MitM. There's like a dozen ways to compromise SSH. It doesn't have to be that way, but it is that way, because of how people use it. |
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| ▲ | Fnoord 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Very few people use SSH with 2FA. PCI DSS, HIPAA, and ISO 27001 each either highly recommend or enforce this. I wouldn't use a jumphost without it. | |
| ▲ | ajross 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Nobody verifies host keys, The known_hosts file is verification of host keys. It's not verification of a host cert, which is a different thing. Most sshd instances are running on ad hoc hardware without the ability to associate them with someone a cert authority would be willing to authenticate. Basically people running services that need cert-based authentication are already using TLS (or if they're using sshd they've locked it down appropriately). SSH is for your workstation and your RPi and whatnot. | | |
| ▲ | SAI_Peregrinus 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | SSH certs aren't TLS certs. Totally different format. All SSH CAs are private, you run your own CA to issue certs to devices you want to allow to connect to your server. | |
| ▲ | PhilipRoman 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >>Nobody verifies host keys, >The known_hosts file is verification of host keys I think the point was that those devices typically generate host keys dynamically and therefore the host key verification is usually turned off, leaving you just with encryption (which is still better than telnet - at least you're safe against passive adversaries). At least that's what I've seen in practice. |
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| ▲ | iamnothere 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Hams use it over packet radio sometimes since encryption is forbidden on the amateur bands. IMHO we need a good telnet replacement that sends signed data. Most people interpret signatures as allowed under FCC rules, just not encryption. |
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| ▲ | mananaysiempre 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > IMHO we need a good telnet replacement that sends signed data. Most people interpret signatures as allowed under FCC rules, just not encryption. I know from bitter experience that IPsec is a “now you have two problems” kind of solution, but the Authentication Header is a thing and is supported by most (all?) implementations. Ham radio operators probably don’t have much use for the actual features of telnet compared to plain netcat, do they? (It’s mostly terminal feature negotiation and such.) | | |
| ▲ | iamnothere 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | TIL that IPsec can be used without encryption. That should work pretty well. Telnet is mostly used for auth and straightforward terminal/BBS access in my experience. There are some other alternatives like HamSSH but I don’t think it’s that common. |
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| ▲ | lambdaone 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You can use ssh with the None cipher, thus disabling encryption entirely while still using the rest of the protocol. | |
| ▲ | ErroneousBosh 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Most people don't care about FCC rules. I'm breaking a tonne of FCC rules right now. | | |
| ▲ | trebligdivad 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes but in many ways it's riskier to do that when you have a license from them. | |
| ▲ | mystraline 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | In general, this is pretty true in practice. Just dont mess with: GPS, Airline radio, cell phones, broadcast infra, emergency services If you're blowing double the power for ISM, nobody cares. Your PEP using a yagi is 4x what is legal? Unless you piss off a ham, nobody cares. And even if you are a ham, and are using 150KHz bandwidth with low power in, say 50MHz (regulation says 40KHz max), again, nobody cares. And also if above 6GHz (common SDR top end), nobody will notice. The equipment up there is $$$$$. But damn, you want to piss off hams? Mention bitrate maximums or encryption. You'll never hear the end from the old gatekeeping idiots. |
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| ▲ | rcakebread 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| One? All the talkers still use it and all the MUDs/MOOs etc. far out number the talkers. |
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| ▲ | conesus 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | N.U.T.S. 3.3.3 4eva! There was a NUTS 4, but about a decade too late. |
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| ▲ | Suzuran 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Some of us still run historical systems for preservation's sake. |
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| ▲ | mcpherrinm 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| As I understand it, greynoise is monitoring scanner traffic, so yes this would all be scans or attacks |
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| ▲ | semyonsh 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| How else would I connect to my BBS to play L.O.R.D. and check FidoNet. |
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| ▲ | VadimPR 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| One reason would be to play MUDs, which are very well and alive these days! |
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| ▲ | omegaham 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| nethack.alt.org still maintains a telnet server! |
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| ▲ | RupertSalt 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | I've always used ssh to connect to it. And it's true that their port 23 is still open at last check. If you cannot reach port 23, and you irrationally hate ssh, you may use 14321 as an alternate. https://www.alt.org/nethack/ |
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| ▲ | breve 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| telnet lambda.moo.mud.org 8888 |
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| ▲ | dekhn 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | MUDs were my introduction to telnet- I grew up a university kid and had access to Wesleyan's minicomputer EAGLE.WESLEYAN.EDU running OpenVMS. I used it to telnet to CMU's TinyMUD and later other TinyMUDs around the country. I recall OpenVMS's telnet had a problem with newlines/carriage returns so all the text was staircased, so I ended up learning C and writing a MUD client. I still habitually use telnet today even if netcat and many other tools have replaced it. All of that was foundational for my career and I still look back fondly on the technology of the time, which tended to be fairly "open" to exploration by curious-minded teenagers. | | |
| ▲ | ErroneousBosh 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | For a few weeks I ran a MUD over AX.25 for a couple of my friends. Because on their own, MUDs aren't nerdy enough, amateur radio isn't nerdy enough, and indeed packet radio isn't nerdy enough. Eventually we decided we'd had our fun and now I needed to the TNC for something else. |
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| ▲ | Quarrel 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Probably one of the reasons this bug survived so long is that it isn't used much for priveleged access any more, but so you can play a moo or play you an ASCII movie, as people below you are replying. |
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| ▲ | para_parolu 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Aardwolf works well from my work laptop. And I don’t care if someone sees what I’m doing |
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| ▲ | stenius 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | Do you care if they steal your account though and drop all your inventory? The problem is the auth is plain text too and you're open to having your credentials stolen. | | |
| ▲ | para_parolu 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | TBH, I don’t care if someone drop all my inventory and delete my account.
If I would care about it then I would obviously not use telnet. |
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| ▲ | myko 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I run a DikuMUD that users connect to using Telnet I really should update it to allow more secure options |
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| ▲ | Fnoord 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | > that users connect to using Telnet Not anymore ;) Seriously though: did you notice any spikes up or down? If you'd run it on a non-standard port, anyone can still connect with netcat, socat, etc etc. | | |
| ▲ | myko 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | Ah, not really. We are on a non-standard port (9000). I just meant some folks use the telnet client to connect, and we do negotiate some telnet options. I use tintin++ these days but I think most of our players are still using decades old zMUD versions to connect! | | |
| ▲ | conesus 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | I always preferred gmud, but zmud has all the bells and whistles. All I needed was ANSI color, aliases, triggers, and command history. How can I get access? | | |
| ▲ | myko 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | ncmdu.net 9000 :) Pretty slow these days, hack 'n slash style game |
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| ▲ | thrance 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| To play DOOM. telnet doom.w-graj.net 666
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| ▲ | 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [deleted] |
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| ▲ | 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
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