Re: Possibly a stupid question RPC over HTTP

[Kevin <KKadow () gmail com>]

On Wed, 13 Oct 2004 15:33:13 -0700 (PDT), S G Masood <sgmasood () yahoo com> wrote:
> Yeah, it certainly is a security risk in several ways.
> Decoding and inspecting HTTPS traffic at the perimeter
> before it reaches the server becomes an absolute
> necessity if RPC over HTTPS is implemented. Same with
> RPC over HTTP.

There was a Microsoft employee on-site for a few days this summer, and
I noticed one day that he was reading MS email messages in Outlook
2003 (not OWA) from his laptop while connected to *our* private LAN.

Any smart enterprise blocks all POP/IMAP/MAPI protocols both inbound
and outbound, so this made me more than a bit suspicious...  When I
checked the proxy traffic from the DHCP address assigned to his
laptop, I saw normal-lookup HTTP requests followed by additional RPC
headers.  Turns out the employee he was working with helpfully gave
him the information to use the outbound proxy, and after configuring
proxy settings in the control panel, it "just worked".

Our visitor went back to Redmond before I could get approval from
management to modify the firewall configuration to explicitly block
RPC-over-HTTP :(

Kevin

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