Lack of secure access to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering's computer resources has become a severe problem within the past year or two. In an effort to reduce the security problems and to increase the safety and reliability of our computer systems, the Department will begin to require secure access to as many services as possible starting in the Fall 2000 semester.
At this time, most standard services have secure counterparts. The primary exception to this is the non-anonymous file transfer protocol (FTP). Until such a time as FTP can be made secure without compromising usability, this service will not require secure access. However, secure remote access to email and login shells will not seriously compromise the usability of these services. For this reason, people are encouraged to begin using secure email and secure logins as soon as possible. Secure access to these services will become mandatory at the beginning of the Fall 2000 semester. This will coincide with ACPUB becoming an SSH-only network (an unofficial, yet confirmed rumor).
The following set of documents should help you in converting your current insecure remote access methods to be secure. Everyone is encouraged to begin using these services immediately in order for us to iron out any problems before the use of these services is required. Please direct any comments to ECE Computer Help