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Comment by hartator | Hacker News Reader

It would be frustrating to be denied access to your own servers because you are traveling and are on a bad IP for some reason.

Picture the amount of Captchas you already getting from a legitimate Chrome instance, but instead of by-passable annoying captchas, you are just locked out.

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I have fail2ban configured on one of my servers for port 22 (a hidden port does not have any such protections on it) and I regularly lock out my remote address because I fat finger the password. I would not suggest doing this for a management interface unless you have secondary access

Why would you use password based auth instead of priv/pub key auth? You'd avoid this and many other security risks.

what do you if you get mugged and you laptop and phone and keys are taken or stolen from you? or lost?

After this party, this guy needed help, he lost his wallet and his phone, his sister also went to the party and gave him a ride there but had left. he didn't know her number to call her, and she'd locked down her socials so we couldn't use my phone to contact her. we were lucky that his socials weren't super locked down and managed to find someone that way, but priv keys are only good so long as you have them.

I use a yubikey. You need a password to use the key. It has it's own brute force management that is far less punishing than a remote SSH server deciding to not talk to me anymore.

but what do you do if you don't have the key? unless it's implanted (which, https://dangerousthings.com/), I don't know that I won't lose it somehow.

My keyboard has a built in USB hub and ports. They key lives there. They keyboard travels with me. It's hard to lose.

I have a backup key in storage. I have escrow mechanisms. These would be inconvenient, but, it's been 40 years since I've lost any keys or my wallet, so I feel pretty good about my odds.

Which is what the game here is. The odds. Famously humans do poorly when it comes to this.

> what do you if you get mugged and you laptop and phone and keys are taken or stolen from you? or lost?

My ssh keys are encrypted. They need a password, or they are worthless.

Sure, I can mistype that password as well, but doing so has no effect on the remote system, as the ssh client already fails locally.

You can and you should back up your keys. There isn't a 100% safe, secure and easy method that shields you from everything that can possibly happen, but there are enough safe, secure and easy ones to cover vast majority of cases other than a sheer catastrophe, which is good enough not to use outdated and security prone mechanisms like passwords on network exposed service.

If I present the incorrect key fail2ban locks me out as well. Two incorrect auth attempts locks out a device for 72 hours. The idea is for regular services which depend on ssh (on port 22) to work regularly (because of key auth) but to block anyone attempting to brute force or otherwise maliciously scan the system.

Doesn’t change the advice, if this is your only management interface, don’t enable it :)

Also you know you can have MFA even with pw authentication right? :)

What's the alternative? If you get onto a bad IP today, you're essentially blocked from the entire Internet. Combined with geolocks and national firewalls, we're already well past the point where you need a home VPN if you want reliable connectivity while traveling abroad.

What happens when your home VPN is inaccessible from your crappy network connection? There are plenty of badly administered networks that block arbitrary VPN/UDP traffic but not ssh. Common case is the admin starts with default deny and creates exceptions for HTTP and whatever they use themselves, which includes ssh but not necessarily whatever VPN you use.

Same as when a crappy network blocks SSH, you get better internet. Or if SSH is allowed, use a VPN over TCP port 22.

Better internet isn't always available. A VPN on the ssh port isn't going to do you much good if someone sharing your IP address is doing brute force attempts against the ssh port on every IP address and your system uses that as a signal to block the IP address.

Unless you're only blocking connection attempts to ssh and not the VPN, but what good is that? There is no reason to expect the VPN to be any more secure than OpenSSH.

If you're using an IP address that's being used to brute force the entire Internet, it's likely that lots of websites are blocking it. If that doesn't matter to you and all you need is to get into a particular SSH server, and also the network blocks VPNs, you're still fine if the SSH is on port 9022 and VPN is port 22. If it's not your own SSH server and it's port 22, then you're still fine if your own VPN is port 22 (on a different host).

Hacking into the VPN doesn't get the attacker into the SSH server too, so there's defense in depth, if your concern is that sshd might have a vulnerability that can be exploited with repeated attempts. If your concern is that your keys might be stolen, this feature doesn't make sense to begin with.

> If you're using an IP address that's being used to brute force the entire Internet, it's likely that lots of websites are blocking it.

Websites usually don't care about ssh brute force attempts because they don't listen on ssh. But the issue isn't websites anyway. The problem is that your server is blocking you, regardless of what websites are doing.

> If that doesn't matter to you and all you need is to get into a particular SSH server, and also the network blocks VPNs, you're still fine if the SSH is on port 9022 and VPN is port 22. If it's not your own SSH server and it's port 22, then you're still fine if your own VPN is port 22 (on a different host).

Then you have a VPN exposed to the internet in addition to SSH, and if you're not rate limiting connections to that then you should be just as concerned that the VPN "might have a vulnerability that can be exploited with repeated attempts." Whereas if the SSH server is only accessible via the VPN then having the SSH server rate limiting anything is only going to give you the opportunity to lock yourself out through fat fingering or a misconfigured script, since nobody else can access it.

Also notably, the most sensible way to run a VPN over TCP port 22 is generally to use the VPN which is built into OpenSSH. But now this change would have you getting locked out of the VPN too.

The situation is the SSH server is exposed everywhere, and you also have an unrelated VPN, maybe even via a paid service you don't manage. The VPN just provides you with an alternative IP address and privacy when traveling. It matters a lot more if someone hacks the SSH server.

It would also be very rare. The penalties described here start at 30s, I don't know the max, but presumably whatever is issuing the bad behavior from that IP range will give up at some point when the sshd stops responding rather than continuing to brute force at 1 attempt per some amount of hours.

And that's still assuming you end up in a range that is actively attacking your sshd. It's definitely possible but really doesn't seem like a bad tradeoff

lol. depending were you travel the whole continent is already blanket banned anyway. but that only happens because nobody travels there. so it is never a problem.

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