Shell access via PDNS LUA

I’ve been spending a bit of time playing with the LUA functionality of Power DNS, it was inevitable that I got round to implementing a generic shell over DNS. It’s not very polished it doesn’t like interactive commands or commands with odd characters and it is more insecure than a very insecure thing that isn’t very safe. It is however a surprisingly short amount of code for what it does. There are a very few circumstances I can think of where a very restricted version of this might be useful, but really there’s always going to be a better and more sensible option. However it’s an interesting proof of concept and more importantly it was fun. If you don’t understand this code do not use it , if you do understand this code you know why you don’t want to use it. The code as shown below won’t actually work… Continue reading

Credential free, anonymous system access

I suspect that in this day and age where very few services are made available via telnet and SSH that this document is of limited use. However I need the notes and it may help out someone else. Anonymous access to services these days isn’t that common, and the traditional approach has always been to use a published username and password. I’ve never been that keen on such an approach as it means the account has to have a valid password and thus be locked out of every other service on the machine, also it means that you present a slightly greater window for people to try to send you malicious data. Because of this I rather prefer to just not ask for credentials on public services. So if you want to allow people to connect to a system via SSH or telnet (Yes I know telnet isn’t secure and… Continue reading