Tool for virtual networks

Saku Ytti saku at ytti.fi
Sat Jul 16 07:02:30 UTC 2022


On Fri, 15 Jul 2022 at 21:57, Grant Taylor via NANOG <nanog at nanog.org> wrote:

> Have you ever walked away from your terminal without locking it?  Or
> seen anyone else do it?

Probably, and probably also after I've already sudoed regardless of
authentication. And of course a retrospective look from any point to
history shows us various trivial local privilege escalation bugs which
have existed for 5-10-15-20 years, i.e. various trivial local
privilege escalation bugs exist now for anyone with hobbyist interest
finding them.
Devices which have a large commercial motive to keep safe and the
vendor owns the whole vertical and thus are easy to build securely,
are regularly owned by hobbyists just for fun. If there is a
commercial motive, you are being pwned regardless of your sudo policy.
Realised risks for big companies appear to be extremely cheap, based
on publicly disclosed  issues and their impact on market
capitalization. Cost of protection must be significantly lower than
realised risk.
Attacker has massive financial leverage, I don't have context to say
anything actually useful, but I believe the leverage is easily 1k, and
could be much more than 1M. That is, every dollar my adversary spends
attacking, I must spend 1000 dollars protecting, to successfully stop
them.
We have many obvious problems in tooling, like using C, which we
pretend are user errors 'git good', which if we decided to fix, could
significantly reduce attack surface, but we don't, no one cares about
infosec.

> There are also concerns of changing effective users on systems to one
> that has the NOPASSWD: option, thereby enabling the original user to do
> what the new user could do without authenticating as the new user.

I can accept concerns, and people are very much free to interpret
their security posture as they wish. But offering objective truths
from opinions is not appropriate.

It is very easy to paint various risk scenarios, but without
substantiating what is the cost of preventing the risk and what is the
cost of realised risk, it is just horoscope. One thing you can achieve
easily in infosec, is decreased productivity due to making things
slower or reducing motivation by forcing people to use workflow they
are not accustomed to.
This model causes escalation of dubious policies which never needed to
be substantiated. Maybe some help, maybe not, but at least they
increase cost.

Various models of working are valid, you could have root only, and you
could use ssh certificate signing for certificates which are valid for
minutes.

> I don't believe avoiding NOPASSWD: is just a horoscope.

Believe being the operative word. Maybe you are right, maybe not,
presenting it as factual truth is dishonest and potentially harmful.

My general rule of thumb, satisfy legal, regulatory and customer
contract requirements for infosec and other than that, largely ignore
policies which are only justifiable by infosec. Of course in many
cases doing things the right way, happens to align with the infosec
community desires and has 0 infosec cost, while having some perceived
infosec gains, and that is fine.

-- 
  ++ytti


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