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Comment by whatthesmack | Hacker News Reader

Apologies... didn't read into the NIST requirement. Out of curiosity, what do you normally implement that meets that requirement? Forcing all traffic when there is no security benefit (what is the advantage of getting to https://news.ycombinator.com through the VPN?) seems ripe for a compensating control.

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If the business prioritizes security, getting to https://news.ycombinator.com would not be possible. If you want to get to https://news.ycombinator.com you use a separate PC.

The PC you use with the VPN is never to be directly connected to the internet. It connects to a piece of dedicated VPN hardware. (could be a Raspberry PI with special software or something far more expensive) That PC can use the VPN, and thus get to various computers within the company, but it can't go elsewhere. No other business is reachable.

The company can allocate IP addresses without NAT and without regard for the rest of the world. There just isn't any connection to the rest of the world, so conflicts can't happen.

It could have to deal with monitoring what is coming and going from the VPN'ed machine. If malware can escape the VPN tunnel, it is less likely to be detected than if it is forced to go through a firewall that is already looking for suspicious traffic. Rather than let a user pick and choose what goes through the VPN and possibly letting the malware make the decision for them, don't let them choose at all. I've worked at places that force you to use the VPN if you aren't connected to the office network. Security of the VPN client aside, it's not a bad idea to force any remote machine to be totally protected from the raw internet.

If the malware (or the user) has root it can hairpin tunnel anything it wants out the default gateway by manipulating the routing tables. It may not even require root but I'd have to tinker with it which I'm too lazy to do.

Split tunnel vs not split tunnel means nothing if the client doesn't want it to mean something.

The rule of thumb is if you must vpn then you have a controlled system where root is limited. Think bank or government systems

Most people in industry I have talked to just do VPN for all traffic, even though that seems crazy to me to route your Hacker News traffic through your prod servers' networks (gross). Normally a compensating control would be appropriate, but if you are pursuing FedRAMP Moderate ATO like we did, you can only get away with a pretty small number of alternative implementations, and only Low findings can be easily accepted by the Federal stakeholders. It's tough.

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