Securing Services With TCP Wrappers and xinetd

TCP wrappers provide access control to a variety of services. Most modern network services, such as SSH, Telnet, and FTP, make use of TCP wrappers, which stand guard between an in-coming request and the requested service.

The benefits offered by TCP wrappers are enhanced when used in conjunction with xinetd, a super service that provides additional access, logging, binding, redirection, and resource utilization control.

For a thorough list of TCP wrapper functionality and control language, refer to the hosts_options man page.

To implement a TCP wrappers banner for a service, use the banner option.

This example implements a banner for vsftpd. To begin, create a banner file. It can be any-where on the system, but it must bear same name as the daemon. For this example, the file is called /etc/banners/vsftpd.

The contents of the file look like this:

Hello, %c All activity on ftp.serverbuddies.com is logged.

The %c token supplies a variety of client information, such as the username and hostname, or the username and IP address to make the connection even more intimidating.

For this banner to be presented to incoming connections, add the following line to the /etc/hosts.allow file:

vsftpd : ALL : banners /etc/banners/

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