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Sega Europe suffers major security breach

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101–108 of 108 posts

Re: Sega Europe suffers major security breach

#101
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the VMs that I have on a system in colocation is my own customized OpenVPN setup, where I also run the openssl CA for it. My phone, laptop, etc all have their own keys. It's set up for my own needs when I want to use a VPN from a weird place. Or simply to bypass artificial restrictions on traffic if I'm on amenity wifi in somebody's office, airport, hotel, etc. Since I can arbitrarily reconfigure it at will, a…

> thread about sec > OpenVPN

What is your context here?

Re: Sega Europe suffers major security breach

#102

A good example of how the usability of your product directly affects security. AWS has multiple forms of credentials. IAM Users (static keys tied to a specific user identity) are one form. But you can also authenticate via SAML or OIDC. If you use SAML/OIDC, you can enforce temporary IAM credentials, audit who authenticated, expire credentials, enforce password rules & MFA, etc. Because IAM Users are the easiest thin…

When allowing 3rd parties to access your AWS resources, IAM keys are in most cases the only way to achieve this. For example, most CI/CD systems don't support OIDC yet, so you have to add IAM keys to them. GitHub Actions is a notable exception here.

Maybe not OIDC, but most support SAML, which is good enough.

There's also SAML/OAuth2/OIDC proxies you can use along with role-specific service accounts, so even legacy app access can be audited and controlled with temporary sessions. One OAuth2 reverse proxy can authenticate entire subdomains worth of web apps. (https://oauth2-proxy.github.io/oauth2-proxy/)

If some proprietary app says they only support static IAM keys, they can easily enable the AWS SDK to transparently handle AWS STS temporary credentials. You just authenticate with some other app (say, saml2aws) and the tokens are cached locally, and the AWS SDK takes care of the rest. (You can also configure the AWS SDK's credential_process feature to make that seamless)

Cross-account AWS access can be granted to specific roles to be assumed with specific IAM policies. No keys or users at all.

Re: Sega Europe suffers major security breach

#103
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason people don't like doing this is that by assuming this role you lose all the privileges in your own account. It's not something you can't overcome (e.g. by using separate credential chains in different parts of the app), but people are lazy.

You don't 'lose' anything, you gain a second set of creds that have an independent lifecycle. The only time this is awkward is if you're using the web console b/c you need to keep going through the assume role/return links.

Not to mention you can just use a new --profile for that session and switch between them with a single argument or environment variable. I don't think it's possible to get easier than that :)

Re: Sega Europe suffers major security breach

#104
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason people don't like doing this is that by assuming this role you lose all the privileges in your own account. It's not something you can't overcome (e.g. by using separate credential chains in different parts of the app), but people are lazy.

You don't 'lose' anything, you gain a second set of creds that have an independent lifecycle. The only time this is awkward is if you're using the web console b/c you need to keep going through the assume role/return links.

That's what I meant, but admittedly I communicated it poorly - you need to reconfigure various bits of the code to use this credentials chain, which can sometimes not be supported by poorly written tools.

Re: Sega Europe suffers major security breach

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strong disagree (not about the law claims, I'll leave that to the law-knowers), but the moral implications of 'crossing a line'. It reads like they revealed security vulnerabilities that had the possibility to harm others. I think they can be allowed some leeway in their methods.

Nope. That can come after responsible disclosure. Did they try the responsible path first? Looks like they notified and then kept going for another 10 days

My understanding is that the 'responsible' path can have groups pursue you while they try to cover up and deflect blame, instead of fixing the problem. Going down that path does not sound very responsible to me.

Re: Sega Europe suffers major security breach

#107
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sega deserved to be punished The store owner was gone on vacation, and thus the side of his store was riddled with graffiti. He deserved to get graffiti because he didn't take basic security precautions.

You don't need to break security to spray the side of a store. You do need to break security to deface a website. Analogies are analogies, they're unnecessary in this case (nowadays). Because we got law to punish people who deface a website, and the law stands on its own. Its akin to people who call 'copyright infringement' 'theft'. Its not the same, its a different mechanic, damages are different, and... different l…

The store owner should have hired security staff to prevent their store from getting graffitied.

I can construct any sort of scenario such that victim blaming is always possible, when the reality is they shouldn't have to worry about their property being messed with.

Re: Sega Europe suffers major security breach

#108
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. That can come after responsible disclosure. Did they try the responsible path first? Looks like they notified and then kept going for another 10 days

> kept going for another 10 days This is the problem I have. They kept going without permission. Leaving your key in the door doesn't give someone the moral authority to go through your house and look for other issues.

What if there were signs of a current and urgent matter?

This seems like the wrong time to bring in analogies, given that we all understand whats being done well enough to talk about it directly. Given that there were obvious problems that implied a clear and present danger to people it seems reasonable to take more immediate, more effective measures.

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