tools:finger
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| tools:finger [2026/03/31 19:00] – [Encrypting Finger] Humphrey Boa-Gart | tools:finger [2026/04/01 07:53] (current) – [More Reading] Humphrey Boa-Gart | ||
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| Openly sharing email addresses and live session data was considered fine in the early years of the internet. But by the early 90's, hackers & corporate spies were abusing the utility to exfiltrate sensitive internal data from corporate, government & military networks. When the daemon itself was found to be hackable - enabling full remote hijacking - it was the final straw and Finger daemons were gradually abandoned. By the turn of the millennium it had mostly vanished, surviving mostly on older systems until gradually most of them were tracked down and exploited as well. | Openly sharing email addresses and live session data was considered fine in the early years of the internet. But by the early 90's, hackers & corporate spies were abusing the utility to exfiltrate sensitive internal data from corporate, government & military networks. When the daemon itself was found to be hackable - enabling full remote hijacking - it was the final straw and Finger daemons were gradually abandoned. By the turn of the millennium it had mostly vanished, surviving mostly on older systems until gradually most of them were tracked down and exploited as well. | ||
| - | Despite this, the beleaguered protocol still has a small yet avid fanbase that overlaps with the remnants of the once-legendary [[tools: | + | Despite |
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| ==== Finger Relays ==== | ==== Finger Relays ==== | ||
| - | One lesser-known feature of Finger was its ability to do **relays**, almost like a built-in proxy service. To explain how it worked, lets suppose the client | + | One lesser-known feature of Finger was its ability to do **relays**, almost like a built-in proxy service. To explain how it worked, lets suppose the client wants to finger user '' |
| finger alice@R7@R6@R5@R4@R3@R2@R1 | finger alice@R7@R6@R5@R4@R3@R2@R1 | ||
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| R7 -> R7 target logic resolves to user query " | R7 -> R7 target logic resolves to user query " | ||
| - | Since it is hop-by-hop forwarding, Finger clients essentially had a built-in way to obfuscate their IP address from the final | + | Since it is hop-by-hop forwarding, |
| - | host in the chain, years before the existence of VPN's. Like the rest of the protocol, this feature was ripe for abuse, | + | |
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| The biggest drawback of Finger is that it is unencrypted, | The biggest drawback of Finger is that it is unencrypted, | ||
| - | But if you are like me, and you see a plaintext request/ | + | But if you are like me, and you see a plaintext request/ |
| + | |||
| + | If you are building mobile apps or using [[radio: | ||
| Well it turns out anyone can define a protocol, and it doesn' | Well it turns out anyone can define a protocol, and it doesn' | ||
| - | You can see the example in-progress '' | + | You can see the example in-progress '' |
| Line 99: | Line 100: | ||
| == Web Links == | == Web Links == | ||
| + | * [[https:// | ||
| * [[rfc> | * [[rfc> | ||
| * [[rfc> | * [[rfc> | ||
tools/finger.1774983617.txt.gz · Last modified: (external edit)
Find this page online at: https://bestpoint.institute/tools/finger
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