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Pwning your web server the easy way or why exposing –/.ssh/ is a bad idea

0day.work

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Re: Pwning your web server the easy way or why exposing –/.ssh/ is a bad idea

#4
post #3

You do not need to put keys on the web sever’s disk to SSH onward from it. Use agent forwarding instead.

Or even use `ProxyJump`, which doesn’t put as much trust on the jump host!

Good points!

I've updated the post.

Thanks!

Re: Pwning your web server the easy way or why exposing –/.ssh/ is a bad idea

#5
This is what I have learned in many years of work: people who know systems should be let to handle those systems.

This is what happens when a developer is left to do the work that a system administrator should be trained to do - not all are -.

For a developer, in most cases, "just works" is the end goal, when referring to systems. Not "how it works", and what are the implications of making it work like this.

This really makes me sad.

Re: Pwning your web server the easy way or why exposing –/.ssh/ is a bad idea

#6

This is what I have learned in many years of work: people who know systems should be let to handle those systems. This is what happens when a developer is left to do the work that a system administrator should be trained to do - not all are -. For a developer, in most cases, "just works" is the end goal, when referring to systems. Not "how it works", and what are the implications of making it work like this. This rea…

I'm glad I can do both, but being the pivot point is less than stellar sometimes and can stick you with odd tasks (or way more than you want).

For too many developers "i shouldn't be blocked" is the highest virtue and that's when things like this happen.

Re: Pwning your web server the easy way or why exposing –/.ssh/ is a bad idea

#9
The files in ~/.ssh are usually initialized with restrictive permissions, so how do they end up getting exposed? The only way I can think off-the-bat is that someone absent-mindedly commits them to their git dotfiles and ends up copying them over to another machine when they do a `git clone` command.

Re: Pwning your web server the easy way or why exposing –/.ssh/ is a bad idea

#10
post #7

You really have to go out of your way to make the www-data user available through ssh, weird some do this.

My thoughts exactly. For someone responsible for a system to do this is such an act of gross negligence, and demonstrates such a lack of competency I would be remiss to keep the person at the company were they my employee.
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