I said I’m basically doing the job of a network and system administrator here in LA — although you could say I have been doing that for the past four years as well, with the main difference that in the past I would have only a few Unix systems to administer, and mostly I had to deal with way too many Windows boxes.
Anyway the interesting part of doing this job is having to deal with the strange concepts of security that customers (and previous administrators) have of security. I won’t enter into much details, but I’ll talk about a few of the common snakeoil that is being sold for security.
First let’s start with the mighty DROP — it seems to be common choice for most network administrators to set up their systems to DROP all the packets that are not to be delivered to their end destination. Why is this done, is up to debate; some insist that it’s to not let known to a scanner that there even is a host there — which only makes sense if there is no service at all on the system that needs to be accessible, in which case we’re talking about different issues. Another alternative story is that it makes it more difficult to discern between services that are available and those who aren’t — Peter Benie analyzed this better than I can do here.
So the only effective reason to use DROP is to reduce the amount of packets to process and send back during a DDoS — which might be something. On the other hand, if there is even one service that is open, they’ll just exploit that one for the DDoS, not multiple ports. On the other hand, using the DROP rule makes it harder to diagnose network problems for other administrators that are just trying to do their job. What is my solution? Rate-limit: you’ll start dropping packets after the host starts actually trying to flood you, this way the usual diagnostics just work correctly.
Then there is the idea that you can solve everything by putting it behind a firewall and a VPN. Somehow there is this silly idea floating around that the moment when you add a firewall in front of your cabinet, and then use a VPN to tunnel from your office, everything is, in one move, capable of being either trusted or not trusted. Bonus points when the firewall’s only task is to avoid “netscans” and otherwise just do port whitelisting for a bunch of Linux servers.
The problem starts appearing the moment you’re expecting to be able over 100Mbps … and you end up instead being bottle-necked by a 40Mbps firewall which is not even using packet inspection! And the snakeoil here is expecting that there is a huge difference between a server with only one whitelisted port on the firewall and the same server with the same port whitelisted by iptables — no there isn’t a policy on the outgoing connections, so don’t ask. Of course anything behind the VPN is then handled like a completely trusted network, with shallow password, if any at all, and no second-factor authentication.
Finally there is what I all hyper-security — the same kind of thing that enthuses OpenBSD users: lock everything down as tight as you might. “Hey it’s not difficult, you just spend time once!” I heard it so many times by now… Nobody is saying that it’s a good idea to ignore security issues and known vulnerabilities, but most of the time you have to come up with a good mediation between security and usability. If your security is so strong that you can’t do anything useful, then it’s bad security.
It’s not just about what you can do with the system — especially for servers it’s pretty trivial to lock it down to exactly just what you need and nothing more, so I can understand one willing to do so. The problem is that unless you can afford to re-validate all the checks every time you have to add something new, the chances are that with maintenance, you can easily slip up and forget about something, either breaking the services you run, or breaching security altogether.
Here’s the main catch: if it’s a system that only has one user, and will die with you, tightening it down is easy and can work, if you’re not an idiot — but if you feel smug because others accept compromises for the sake of not being a human single point of failure, stop it because you’re just the kind of scum that causes so many people to say “pfft” to security. You can actually have two very easy examples for it in Windows Vista and Fedora.
The former started asking you to confirm every single operation, to the point that users ended up click “Ok” without reading what it asked
- Do you want to install the drivers for the printer you just bought? Ok.
- Do you want to install the operating system updates? Ok.
- Do you want to install Firefox? Ok.
- Do you want to upgrade Firefox? Ok.
- Do you want to install Microsoft Office? Ok.
- Do you want to update Microsoft Office? Ok.
- Do you want to install Adobe Reader? Ok.
- Do you want to install this little game you just downloaded? Ok.
- Do you want to install this driver that sniffs your network traffic? Ok.
I’ve seen malware actually requiring a confirmation, easy to actually notice if you look at the window, but usually just discarded by clicking “Ok” without looking.
For what concerns Fedora instead — you probably are familiar with the decision on RedHat’s part of enabling SELinux by default on their installs, since a very long time ago. And I tend to agree that it’s a good thing; the problem is that most people don’t understand how to work with SELinux, and lacking simple ways to do what they need to do in simple ways, they just decide to turn SELinux off altogether — this is the same problem with Nagios plugins and sudo where the documentation just tells you to give them sudo access to everything.
I could probably write a lot more about this kind of situations but I don’t think it’s worth my time. I just think that people insisting on hyper-security are detrimental to the overall security of the population, as they scare people away.
