ffingerd(8)

NAME

ffingerd - secure and lightweight finger daemon

DESCRIPTION

The ffingerd program is a drop-in replacement for the
standard fingerd that comes with most systems today. Most finger
daemons in use today support several features which are not ac
ceptable for security-conscious system administrators, so many
chose to disable the finger service completely. This version of
the finger daemon is invoked by inetd, but it's not meant to be
run as root. In fact, it should run as nobody. Ffingerd does
not allow global finger queries (finger @host), indirect finger
queries (finger foo@host.a@host.b), it does not give away valu
able information like the shell, login directory and time of last
login, and users can put a ".nofinger" file in their homes and
then ffingerd will respond with "That user does not want to be
fingered".

LOGGING

Requests that may indicate attacks are logged by ffingerd
through the syslog(3) facility. The default facility is
LOG_INFO, you can change that by editing config.h after running
configure.
These requests are logged :
empty finger attempts
finger @victim.com # find out who's logged in
indirect finger attempts
finger root@victim.com@innocuous.edu
# to victim.com this finger query comes from
# innocuous.edu
unwanted finger attempts
Users can put .nofinger files in their home, and
then attempts to finger them will yield
That user does not want to be fingered

FILES

~/.nofinger, ~/.plan, ~/.project, ~/.pubkey

BUGS

When ffingerd is running as nobody and a user does not
have world execute permission set for his home, then ffingerd can
not check whether that user has a .nofinger file there and as
sumes it's not there.

SEE ALSO

http://www.fefe.de/ffingerd/

AUTHOR

Felix von Leitner (felix@fefe.de),
FFIN
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