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You mention backdoors in 31.2.2 but really this is a much more major problem. You say in 31.1.3 and 31.1.4 (pg 677) that the three tiers provide redundancy but it's not true. If you remove physical access, remote access and service access you may still be open to abuse.

eg a machine under a desk (or in a data center) that makes outgoing ssh connections via the webproxy to a remote machine and port forwards back from that machine to port 22. Or even makes an openVPN connection. The person now has remote access to your network. This backdoor could even run on a production server with an innocuous process name.

eg a .forward file or entry in mail aliases programmed to execute commands when a specially formatted email

eg a process that monitors a TXT RR of some DNS entry somewhere and executes commands found in it.

These possibilities scare me and I'd love it if you had a good way of solving these problems!

-- StephenHarris - 31 Aug 2006