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This is just scaremongering. Installing the command line LDAP tools (which is a horrendous binary protocol) is no harder than installing netcat or tcpdunp.

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Do you have netcat compiled for Cisco IOS and JunOS? If so, please send them to me, and let me know how to get them into the devices firmware.

It might sound like scaremongering to you. To me, the reality is every network I've worked on have had devices that I can not install and run arbitrary code on. Most non roll-your-own routers for example does not give you a shell where you can install arbitrary applications. But many of them do have tools like ability to telnet to help diagnose problems.

So how do you debug the myriad of binary protocols that already exist today? How do you debug SSL services?

For that matter, how do you perform more than cursory debugging of HTTP services? Do you seriously sit there and carefully type out HTTP 1.1 compliant requests, along with requisite headers and maybe even cookies? Does that actually work for debugging complex issues, and does it really differ that substantially from the debugging one performs to see if a binary protocol service is up and accepting requests?

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