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Comment by joshma | Hacker News Reader

We currently use a mildly exotic "temporary bastion" approach, where upon request / approval a dev can get a container launched. The container is launched on ECS running an ssh server, pinned to the dev's individual public key, and that container has the appropriate security groups / IAM roles to access various production resources.

Right now, a dev will 1) VPN to get shallow network access and 2) SSH over VPN to get deeper network access through the bastion container. Something like a database is security group'd off so that you need to be on the bastion container to access.

My question - would Twingate be able to support an ephemeral use case like this? I'm thinking ideally it can be launched as a sidecar container, and a dev could SSH through the twingate container. A lot of solutions I see don't seem to handle ephemeral situations super well, so I was curious.

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Hey, great question, and your setup seems very secure, but I’m sure it would be nice to reduce some of the overhead. The right way to support your ephemeral bastion use case with Twingate will ultimately be to use a public API that we plan to launch later this year. That will allow you programmatically deploy connectors as needed.

However, I’d also question whether you even need your ephemeral bastions anymore with Twingate. A big part of the value is that you can do away with any public entry points (even if they are secured as well as you’ve described) and very tightly control who can access hosts on your deeper network. Do your bastions do more than provide access points? For example, session auditing is pretty common.

Can you explain how this is more secure than SSH to a bastion host via an out of band network?

Could you clarify a bit on "out of band" in this use case? In principle, if you have a way to access your bastion on a completely private--maybe physically separate / leased line--network, then that's going to be extremely secure, but maybe you had a different use case in mind?

Out of band could be as simple as ngrok, or cloudflare Argo - or as you suggest by a separate connection.

SSH is two factor - key + password and Argo,ngrok,wireguard to a VPS provide DDoS mitigation and attack surface concealment and reduction.

I think I’m missing what your product adds.

Gotcha. In your example: nothing. We're okay with that. The level of security that results from the setup you described is what we are hoping Twingate will bring to people with convenience and ease of management built-in. I'm always amazed at the very wide range of sophistication that different teams and companies approach security with, and very, very few companies are at the level of your example. That's what we're excited to help change with this new product.

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