Subject: Air Gap & News

From: William Hay <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 26 Dec 2020 10:25:17 +0000

I came across nncp recently and it seems interesting but the documentation
could do with some improvement.

http://www.nncpgo.org/UsecaseAirgap.html#UsecaseAirgap Says it is about
using nncp via air gap but AFAICT only describes how to send via a network
connected intermediate machine.  No documentation, or even example,
is given for configuring  the intermediate machine to copy the packets
to removable storage.

http://www.nncpgo.org/Comparison.html#Comparison Says No for
sneakernet friendliness/UUCP while the commentary says this
requires more manual configuration.  I set this up a few
years ago for myself and although there is a little setup
work once done it is about as automatic as sneakernet can
get. https://www.dumain.com/posts/Forward_to_the_1970s_with_UUCP.../
This could be more secure but my threat model doesn't involve targetted
attacks so a little security throught obscurity sprinkled over the
air gap seemed sufficient.  I might replace it with NNCP if the airgap
documentationwere better.

Under News Transmission it says Yes for UUCP and No for NNCP.  The only
support UUCP has for news transmission is that if your news system
supplies an rnews binary then it will be enabled for remote execution
by default.  AFAICT there is nothing to prevent enabling rnews remote
execution over NNCP or configuring your news server to send rnews batches
via NNCP (replace uux command in uucp recipies with nncp equivalent).

Also saying UUCP only supports PAP for peer authentication is somewhat
misleading since, by tying each peer to a particular unix login, it
can use whatever authentication your OS provides (most of my uucp nodes
authenticate via ssh keys).

William