391–400 of 530 posts
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Honestly, the modern JavaScript toolchain is better at giving reverse engineers a headache than 80% of binary obfuscators.
As someone who is not very good at JavaScript reverse engineering, I would tend to agree that minifiers are pretty annoying.
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Again, this is where all port knocking debates devolve to ... Port knocking is not the christ child that will wash away all of our sins ... and therefore is not worth implementing. You're right! It doesn't add that much . But it's non-zero and has almost zero cost. It's very elegant, in my mind, and it makes me very happy.
It doesn't add enough to compensate for its costs, which are commensurate with those of VPNs, which provide drastically more return on the investment. But VPNs don't have a cheering section, because they're so obviously useful that nobody has any incentive to make that banal observation. "Port knocking" is idiosyncratic and widely looked down on by security engineering teams, so there's a contrarian impulse that make…
I do agree, nobody should be going to sleep at night, relying solely on obscurity as their source of protection. But these commenters are offering it as an additional layer of indirection. They're not touting it as _the_ solution, full stop.
At the most basic level, would you refute the claim that port knocking or alternate ports are adding additional friction for an attacker, or no?
Myself, I would prefer to run a simple, (hopefully) set-and-forget daemon on my server if it really did add an extra layer of obscurity to my secured SSH service.
I guess I just fail to see why it's one against the other.
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Again, this is where all port knocking debates devolve to ... Port knocking is not the christ child that will wash away all of our sins ... and therefore is not worth implementing. You're right! It doesn't add that much . But it's non-zero and has almost zero cost. It's very elegant, in my mind, and it makes me very happy.
It doesn't add enough to compensate for its costs, which are commensurate with those of VPNs, which provide drastically more return on the investment. But VPNs don't have a cheering section, because they're so obviously useful that nobody has any incentive to make that banal observation. "Port knocking" is idiosyncratic and widely looked down on by security engineering teams, so there's a contrarian impulse that make…
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The number of times I've seen people shitting all over port knocking is truly confusing. Since we added it several years ago, we've not had a single case of hackers trying to break into sshd. Before port knocking, 100's a day, even though it was on a very unusual port. I try to tell people this, when they poo poo port knocking, but they just don't get it. EDIT: s/the/they/
The same with "GnuPG is bad" mantra on hackernews. There is nothing better that GPG currently for all its functionality and the only answer you get when asking for substitute is don't use this function or use some obscure application. Yeah right.
Also, an informed analysis of PGP: https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html
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"But SSH is a terrible example, because the cost to the defender of simply not having SSH vulnerabilities is the same, or even less, than the cost of obfuscating it with nonstandard ports, "port knocking", or fail2ban, which are all silly ideas." I know who I am arguing with here but port knocking is not silly. It's fantastic . When I say fantastic, I don't mean it solves all of our problems and obviates any other pr…
> I believe there are sshd vulns extant that you and I don't know about and port knocking allows me to worry less about them. That's interesting, that's the first time I've heard a justification for port knocking that actually makes sense to me. I'm curious for others' thoughts here -- are non-public vulnerabilities something you consciously try to mitigate? So that, for example, using 2 different 8-character passwor…
Sure, a small percentage of adversaries are in neither category, and a random hacker dedicated to hitting your specific server may suspect port knocking and could try to circumvent it, but most companies don't have an adversary like that, and even if they do, you've made it harder for them for a small cost.
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It doesn't add enough to compensate for its costs, which are commensurate with those of VPNs, which provide drastically more return on the investment. But VPNs don't have a cheering section, because they're so obviously useful that nobody has any incentive to make that banal observation. "Port knocking" is idiosyncratic and widely looked down on by security engineering teams, so there's a contrarian impulse that make…
A tangent: are VPNs other than WireGuard less likely to have vulns compared to SSH? Seems the same to me (or worse for OpenVPN a few years ago)
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Again, this is where all port knocking debates devolve to ... Port knocking is not the christ child that will wash away all of our sins ... and therefore is not worth implementing. You're right! It doesn't add that much . But it's non-zero and has almost zero cost. It's very elegant, in my mind, and it makes me very happy.
I guess my point is largely: I can set up a VPN in a roughly similar timeframe to setting up port knocking, and it has roughly similar overhead for end user, but the VPN gives me significantly more security while also solving the same issue port knocking does. In that case, why not just set up a VPN instead of port knocking?
While I fully agree that portknocking doesn’t provide the same layer of protection or flexibility a VPN does - but with the original article in mind: if your reason for deploying a VPN is because you fear to expose unknown bugs in sshd to the Internet the same could be said about every vpn solution.
Therefore portknocking is / (would be*) indeed more elegant because
- it makes no promises to be secure (as in as secure as a VPN) - one could argue: if you use it you know that portknocking is just an additional security layer - and maybe don’t get lazy as in a VPN - a misconfiguration or bug or an attacker might expose sshd on your hosts - a misconfigured VPN at least in a somewhat sizeable deployment can lead to countless attack surfaces
Having said that, that only will work if the rest of the sshd security is in check and your password isn’t hunter2
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Yeah but if they compromise the VPN they potentially have access to a lot more than just the SSH server. At least in the setups I've seen deployed.
I'm not sure I necessarily understand your argument, so my apologies if I'm off here. In scenario 1, you do not gate access via VPN. Things are accessible via the public internet. In scenario 2, you do gate access via VPN. Things are not accessible via the public internet. Someone compromises the VPN. They now have as much access as if there was no VPN and things were accessible to the public internet. In scenario 2,…
Of course if the setup is VPN -> firewall -> SSH to make sure only the SSH is exposed through VPN, then I agree you'd be more secure with VPN+SSH.
One point I haven't seen brought up yet is that anywhere from 25% to 35% of data breaches are related to an internal actor. Your obscurity will do nothing in those cases, because the internal actor will actually know about the obscurity. That being said there is a place for obscurity in security, it just has to be traded off with the usability issues.