this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
186 points (97.9% liked)
Asklemmy
44151 readers
1129 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Obfuscation is not security, changing the port doesn't increase your security
I see this claim all the time, and it bugs me every time. Obfuscation is a perfectly reasonable part of a defense in depth solution. That's why you configure your error messages on production systems to give very generic error messages instead of the dev-centric messages with stack traces on lower environments, for example.
The problem comes when obscurity is your only defense. It's not a full remediation on its own, but it has a part in defense in depth.
Changing the port isn't really much obfuscation though. It doesn't take long to scan all ports for the entire IPv4 range (see masscan)
It helps against stupid automated attacks though.
If someone has changed the port it's likely that they have set up a great password or disabled password auth all together.
It's worth it for just having cleaner logs and fewer attempts.
Those logs are useful to know which IPs to permanently block :)
Technically a password is obfuscation anyway
I hear you, but I disagree:
It buys you enough time to check the journals and see that a group of IPs have attempted various ports giving you enough time to block the IP altogether.
It also buys you disinterest from the malicious host, since probably there's a hard limit on how many ports they will test, and they will flag your machine as "too much work" and try another.
Again, I agree with you that obfuscation is not security, but it sure does help.
From what I understand you obfuscate the port in order to limit the amount of incoming attacks. But then fail2ban would be a much more effective tool.
The disinterested aspect you described is the actual problem. Because it's based on the assumption your port won't be found, but it definitely will, and as soon as that happens you'll end up in a database such as shodan and the entire effect is GONE.