In article <Fergus.Doherty-ya02408000R1108981259390001 at news.nottingham.ac.uk>,
Fergus Doherty <Fergus.Doherty at nottingham.ac.uk> wrote:
>(Since then I have been able to buy White Pine's eXodus for MacOS which is
>very good.
Indeed it is, but it has security problems (it allows all users on the
host to which you are making an XDMCP query to access your X display,
and there is no way to stop it doing this).
MacX is also insecure. I do not know of any Mac X server which does
not have this sort of problem, yet.
On PCs, Exceed is similarly configured unsecurely by default, although
you can configure it not to allow xhost type authentication.
This is a serious worry at the moment, since machines in UK
universities are being actively probed by hackers for insecure X
servers.
If you want to do X, I would suggest either using Exceed, or (better
still) use a UNIX box; either a genuine workstation or a Linux box set
up as an X terminal, running as little other software as possible, so
that it doesn't become a target for hackers itself.
Tim.
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Dr T J R Cutts Tel: +44 1223 333596
Dept. of Biochemistry, 80 Tennis Court Rd.
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