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D_Hartup

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Remote Desktop Web Connection security

I have installed the TSWeb service on IIS on a win2k machine on a DMZ outside my network.  I have tried looking on the internet for various white papers on the security of TSWeb, i.e what are the backdoors, are there any ways to make it more secure (I have changed the port it uses, and run the IIS lockdown wizard), and cant find anything.  Anyone out there know how to lock it down??

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fcisler

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visioneer

You're better off using a VPN to access Terminal Services if you don't want to expose your internal servers to the Internet.
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Rich Rumble
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fcisler, how did you setup TS through the SSH tunnel? i forwarded port 3389 to 3390 through and ssh session opened via putty but when i try typing "http://localhost:3390/tsweb" i don't get anything.
any help would be greatly appreciated.

thanks!
jeremy
jeremy,

well thats because 3389 is not the TS web component, and 3389 to 3390 is to vauge...you mean 2289 local to 3390 remote? will not work. remote side is running on 3389.
My situation is that i have a FreeBSD machine with a constant tunnel open, and since TS does not run on that i have 3389 allowed to accept connections from any client. Best approach would be to use a machine without TS and do 3389 to 3389 and just open RDP and for host type "localhost"

a side note though:
i have encountered situations on XP pro where even if RDP is not enabled on the localhost, and you use SSH 3389:3389, it will tell you that you cannot open a connection to localhost. In that situation, i allowed remote connections to port (local ports accept connections from other hosts, in putty), and used another machine (so run ssh on "snoopy" and have "peanuts" RDP into "snoopy")
If you have access to a linux machine (i belive this is correct, if not it's pretty close)
ssh -l username external.host.name.or.ip -g -L 3389:ip.address.of.remote.side:3389
i sometimes like the tunnel to be open for, say, 15 minutes, then close automatically
append -f sleep 300
-f tells it to run a command then go into background mode
sleep x tells it to sleep for x seconds
hope this helped
just re-read.....hmmmm....for the TS web, i am not completely positive if the active X is run on client or server side, i would say client. In that case, you probally still need 3389 and the webserver port (80 i guess? linux add another -L 80:ip.addy:80, or putty is self explanatory) and then in that case it may still be localhost or may be name of the server....but my question is....why? why not use TS client (the .exe?) if having it on the machine is a problem, zip it or just throw it on an outisde share, "run from current location" and eliminate an un-needed step. as for security, i just looked up the XP ts client - Maximum encryption strength: 128 bits. Now heres the tricky part - i don't know if it is encrypted for the connect, or if all information is encrypted. It dosen't matter much to me, but let me pull up a paper on SSH security.
I use OpenSSH on my FreeBSD machine at home and here
http://www.openssh.com/security.html
looking on ssh.com
"Possible Ciphers:
AES128
AES192
AES256
3DES
Blowfish
Twofish
Arcfour
CAST
DES (weak, for compatability purposes)
"
Not only is the inital stage of SSH encrypted, but every stage of traffic thereafter is.
No offense, but whatever you need this for is not something that someone is going to take their time to even break 56 bit encryption, but you had asked, so here it is.

-end rant- ;)
my suggestion: dump the tsweb, use the exe. tsweb adds a layer of complication.
thanks for all the info. i figured it out half-way: had to ssh tunnel port 80 as well but then i had problems with the hostname being recognized. anyway, i normally have been using the remote desktop client. i actually discovered that a web client existed not too long ago. but i'm just messing around with it more than anything. yea, it is impractical to open up an ssh tunnel for rdesktop over the web when i could just use the exe client. basically, i'm just trying to get it to work for the sake of getting it to work. not for anything urgent... anyway, remote desktop is pretty cool. much faster than vnc. i love it.