On Sun, 14 Dec 2008, martin wrote:
Dear David.
Why do you trust VPN more than the SSH?
I ask because I have just removed the "first VPN then SSH" solution in favor
for a SSH only solution using Gitosis just to get rid of the VPN which I
believe is less secure than SSH (well until I read you comments below).
I thought I was doing something right for once but maybe I'm not?
Thanks and best regards
Martin
in part it's that a VPN is a single point of control for all remote
access.
If you use ssh you end up exposing all the individual machines
1. data leakage of just what machines exist to possibly hostile users.
2. the many machines are configured seperatly, frequently by different
people. this makes it far more likely that sometime some machine will get
misconfigured.
3. people who are focused on providing features have a strong temptation
to cut corners and just test that the feature works and not test that
everything that isn't supposed to work actually doesn't work. as a
result, in many companies there is a deliberate seperation (and tension)
between a group focused on controlling and auditing access and one that is
focused on creating fucntionality and features.
also from a polical/social point of view everyone recognises that if you
grant someone VPN access you are trusting them, but people don't seem to
think the same way with ssh.
David Lang
david@xxxxxxx wrote:
this is really a reply to an earlier message that I deleted.
the question was asked 'what would the security people like instead of SSH'
as a security person who doesn't like how ssh is used for everything, let
me list a couple of concerns.
ssh is default allow (it lets you run any commands), you can lock it down
with effort.
ssh defaults to establishing a tunnel between machines that other network
traffic can use to bypass your system. yes I know that with enough effort
and control of both systems you can tunnel over anything, the point is that
ssh is eager to do this for you (overly eager IMHO)
ssh depends primarily on certificates that reside on untrusted machines. it
can be made to work with tokens or such, but it takes a fair bit of effort.
sshd runs as root on just about every system
people trust ssh too much. they tend to think that anything is acceptable
if it's done over ssh (this isn't a technical issue, but it is a social
issue)
what would I like to see in an ideal world?
something that runs as the git user, does not enable tunneling, and only
does the data transfer functions needed for a push. it should use
off-the-shelf libraries for certificate authentication and tie into PAM for
additional authentication.
the authentication would not be any better than with SSH, but the rest
would be better. I was very pleased to watch the git-daemon development,
and the emphisis on it running with minimum privilages and provide just the
functionality that was needed, and appropriately assuming that any
connection from the outside is hostile until proven otherwise.
what would I do with current tools?
I would say that developers working from outside should VPN into the
company network before doing the push with SSH rather than exposing the SSH
daemon to the entire Internet.
in the medium term, if the git-over-http gets finished, I would like to see
a seperate cgi created to allow push as well. http is overused as a
tunneling protocol, but it's easy to setup a server that can't do anything
except what you want, so this tunneling is generally not a threat to
servers (it's a horrible threat to client systems)
David Lang
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