Comment by jameskilton
2 months ago
The last decade has seen an increase push in what Google started calling "Zero Trust"[0] and dropping VPNs entirely. The issue being that once someone got into a VPN it was much, much harder to prevent them from accessing important data.
So everything "internal" is now also external and required to have its own layer of permissions and the like, making it much harder for, e.g. the article, to use one exploit to access another service.
I don’t see that really as an argument for this. You still should use VPN as an additional layer of security, assuming that you use some proper protocol. Then zero trust applies to internal network.
In the bad old days, if your company-internal tools were full of XSS bugs, fixing them wasn't a priority, because the tools could only be accessed with a login and VPN connection.
So outside attackers have already been foiled, and insider threats have a million attack options anyway, what's one more? Go work on features that increase revenue instead.
In principle the idea of "zero trust" was to write your internal-facing webapps to the same high standards as your externally-facing code. You don't need the VPN, because you've fixed the many XSS bugs.
In practice zero trust at most companies means buying something extremely similar to a VPN.
> In principle the idea of "zero trust" was to write your internal-facing webapps to the same high standards as your externally-facing code. You don't need the VPN, because you've fixed the many XSS bugs.
But why stop there? If these apps are not required to be accessed from public world, by setting up VPN you need to exploit both VPN and and the service to have an impact. Denial of specific service is harder and exploiting known CVEs is harder.
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Rule #1 of business, government, or education: Nobody, ever, ever, does what they “should.”
Even here: Hacker News “should” support 2 factor authentication, being an online forum literally owned by a VC firm with tons of cash, but they don’t.
Should they? From a threat modeling perspective, what's the consequences for HN of a user having their password compromised? Are those consequences serious enough to warrant the expense and added complexity of adding MFA?
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I'm firmly in the pro 2FA camp, but merely as a point of discussion: the Arc codebase is already so underwater with actual features that would benefit a forum, and if I changed my password to hunter2 right now the only thing that would happen is my account would shortly be banned when spammers start to hate-bomb or crypto-scam-bomb discussion threads. Dan would be busy, I would be sad, nothing else would happen
For accounts that actually mean something (Microsoft, Azure, banking, etc), yes, the more factors the better. For a lot of other apps, the extra security is occupying precious roadmap space[1]
1: I'm intentionally side-stepping the "but AI does everything autonomously" debate for the purpose of this discussion
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I am currently having this debate at $DAYJOB, having come from a zero trust implementation to one using fucking Cloudflare Warp. The cost to your "just use a VPN" approach or, if I'm understanding your point correctly, use VPN and zero trust(?!), is that VPNs were designed for on-premises software. In modern times, the number of cases where one needs to perform a fully authenticated, perfectly valid action, from a previously unknown network on previously unconfigured compute is bigger than in the "old days"
GitHub Actions are a prime example. Azure's network, their compute, but I can cryptographically prove it's my repo (and my commit) OIDC-ing into my AWS account. But configuring a Warp client on those machines is some damn nonsense
If you're going to say "self hosted runners exist," yes, so does self-hosted GitHub and yet people get out of the self-hosted game because it eats into other valuable time that could be spent on product features
> is that VPNs were designed for on-premises software.
The way I see this is that VPN is just network extender. Nothing to do with design for on-premise software. By using VPN as an additional layer, most of the vulnerability scanners can’t scan your services anymore. It reduces the likelihood that you are impacted immediately by some publicly known CVEs. That is the only purpose of VPN here.
VPN may also have vulnerabilities, but for making the impact, both VPN and service vulnerability is required at the same time. The more different services/protocols you have behind VPN, more useful it is. It might not make sense if you have just ssh need, for example. Then you have 1:1 protocol ratio, and ssh could be more secure protocol.
In theory, for automated traffic like that you should probably be using a plain Access application with a service token rather than WARP
Does having a VPN/intranet preclude zero trust? It seems you could do both with the private network just being an added layer of security.
It doesn't, but from my perspective the thinking behind zero trust is partly to stop treating networking as a layer of security. Which makes sense to me - the larger the network grows, the harder to know all its entry-points and the transitive reach of those.
A VPN? Yes, by definition. Zero trust requires that every connection is authenticated and users are only granted access to the app they request. They never “connect to the network” - something brokers that connection to the app in question.
VPN puts a user on the network and allows a bad actor to move laterally through the network.
It doesn't have to. There's nothing to stop you using a VPN as an initial filter to reduce the number of people who have access to a network and then properly authenticating and authorizing all access to services after that.
In fact, I'd say is a good defence-in-depth approach, which comes at the cost of increased complexity.
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The zero trust architechture implies (read: requires) that authentication occurs at every layer. Token reuse constitutes a replay attack that mandatory authentication is supposed to thwart. Bypass it and the system's security profile reverts back to perimeter security, with the added disadvantage of that perimeter being outside your org's control.
The big problem with the ZT approach is that smaller shops don't have a lot of developers and testers (some maybe with a security inclination) to be certain to a somewhat high degree that their app is written in a secure manner. Or be able to continuously keep abreast of every new security update Microsoft or other IdP makes to their stack.
It is easy for Google/Microsoft and any other FAANG like company to preach about Zero Trust when they have unlimited (for whatever value of unlimited you want to consider) resources. And even then they get it wrong sometimes.
The simpler alternative is to publish all your internal apps through a load balancer / API gateway with a static IP address, put it behind a VPN and call it a day.
> publish all your internal apps through a load balancer / API gateway with a static IP address, put it behind a VPN and call it a day.
Or just use Cognito. It can wrap up all the ugly Microsoft authentication into it's basic OAuth and API Gateway can use and verify Cognito tokens for you transparently. It's as close to the Zero Trust model in a Small Developer Shop we could get.
Zero trust is a good concept turned into a dumb practice. Basically people buying Google's koolaid for this forgot about "defense in depth". Yeah, authenticating every connection is great, throwing a big effing moat around it too is better.
The other thing is most companies are not Google. If you're a global company with hundreds of thousands of people who need internal access, moats may be non-ideal. For a business located in one place, local-only on-premise systems which block access to any country which they don't actively do business with is leaps and bounds better.