Comment by kube-system
18 hours ago
Yeah, most organizations need to expose something to the internet as a matter of normal operations -- at least some sort of a web app if not dozens. It would be great if we could all just have udp 56820 listening silently for a key, but that isn't reasonable for most organizations that have normal users expecting normal applications.
Yes, everyone is rushing to implement zero-trust principles for real now. It's getting harder to trust that your public facing endpoints don't have vulnerabilities, and it's getting harder to trust that your internal software and endpoints haven't been compromised from within your pre-existing trust boundaries. A lot of the increased workload is due to patching up the existing security infrastructure, and on top of that, building out new solutions to better fit today's threat landscape.
Ideally they need to divide those apps entirely; your public website doesn't need to talk to your app.
For stuff like Netflix that is truly consumer-facing, where mTLS or IP whitelisting are non-starters, the reality is you have to rethink your model entirely.
Also, I'm not sure where you got the idea I'm talking about on-prem only; this also applies to using IaaS/ cloud hosted infra.
The reason we were talking about on-prem is because we're talking about the effort of doing these things yourself vs farming it out to a third party.
If you're a security engineer responsible for securing only:
1. a public website
2. stuff that can be ip whitelisted and/or use mTLS
Consider yourself very lucky. Most orgs need to expose a lot more than that.
Almost no companies farm their security out to third parties. The era of MSSPs is long dead, except for small non-IT businesses like mom-and-pop law firms.
> Most orgs need to expose a lot more than that.
No, in fact there are only 2 kinds of connections:
1) public, necessarily allows anonymous/unauthenticated connections
2) non-public, doesn't need to allow unauthenticated connections
Name a service, and I can tell you which one it is.
Or put another way, there are authenticated and unauthenticated services. If you can authenticate someone at the application level, you could do it at the network level.
Most places have combined them at some boundary, for ease of access, but there is no case in which an authenticated application endpoint (even /login) has to allow unauthenticated network access to it.
And in all seriousness, name a service that is not a public website, but cannot use mTLS or IP allowlisting.
SFDC? mTLS. Customer webhooks? IP whitelisting. Data warehouse? PtP VPN.
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