Gaping security hole? (network db connections)

Is it just me misreading things, or is there no security whatsoever in the network sqlexec connections to an informix DB server? I was under the initial impression that the informix server used the .rhosts/hosts.equiv mechanism to validate users - where the remote connection says it is connecting from user 'joe', and since it is connecting from a trusted (<1024) port, that information can be trusted to be genuine. I just noticed that I have had my informix sqlexec executable installed for months without it being setuid - and it works FINE. So, basically, ANYONE can connect from a trusted machine and talk to the database. The only protection at this point appears to be that you'd have to be able to fake the protocol that sqlexec uses to talk to the client. (Can we say 3-5 hours with tcpdump?) Once you did that, you could connect to the remote server and masquerade as anyone, even if you did not have root access on the client station. Am I missing something here, or is this as gaping a security hole as it appears to be? -- Nathan ------------------------------------------------------------ Nathan Neulinger Univ. of Missouri - Rolla EMail: nneul@umr.edu Computer Center WWW: http://www.umr.edu/~nneul SysAdmin: rollanet.org