Comment by LoganDark
12 hours ago
Attack surface almost entirely goes away if you just require a good port knock first! I do that with my protection SSH servers and it works just fine. Also prevents anyone from knowing there even is an SSH server there. Or any server if it doesn't respond to pings either, and only uses reverse tunnels to accept public connections
Wireguard doesn’t respond to malformed packets or handshakes from unknown devices by design.
Oh, awesome!
Is there a way to automate port knocks in your .ssh/config? I think that’s the main reason why I haven’t added it to my home server.
Technically you could use a ProxyCommand that does the knock and then runs nc to your target.
Port knocking is idiotic and amounts to Biff Tannen's "only I know how to start this car".
Dunno, in combination with having an up to date system following best practices, port knocking is probably going to save you when bots start scanning the internet with the next SSH 0day. Any amount of friction will cause the bots to move to the next IP address.
Just moving SSH off a default port gets you 98% there.
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LLMs port knock for redteam scans. Have for a long time.
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It's more like "only I know how to find this keyhole". You still need the key then, you're just also adding some defense against picking.
It would be idiotic to use the knock as the only authentication, which is why I don't.
To be quite honest, I just like the aesthetics of it.
You're sending your knock over the public network in the clear. It's observable by anything in the path. And then you're not the only one that can find the keyhole.
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