JumpServer: Open-Source Privileged Access Management
github.com
github.com
I've bought a bunch of companies and seriously evaluated hundreds of them, and the ones where people had a bastion host set up commonly seemed to act as if it protected them from everything, to the point where they just stopped worrying about security otherwise.
It gives a false sense of security and makes people put their guard down - like "OK, we have everything secured behind the firewall and only people who can log in to the bastion host, so there's no need for firewall rules or policies on the servers inside our firewall perimeter". Which inevitably breaks down over time as things get opened up to the internet, employees come and go, etc.
I can't tell you the number of companies where I look at their setup and their bastion host itself is root owned - since those hosts are always being used (and are tied to everything so you can't easily reboot or replace them), and are considered nothing more than a "tool" that you rarely actually have to look at, they don't get updated nearly enough and are neglected.
Not saying that bastion hosts are a bad idea - but just like any easy to use, easy to forget, high risk part of the stack, they are often a sign of inexperience and neglect elsewhere in the architecture.
(Yes, I know that there are plenty of big companies that use jump boxes without issue, and this jumpserver product is different, but I'm specifically talking about the idea of having one little machine that is open to SSH and then you bounce off of that to get into the "secured" machines, and all of this just based on my own experience and may not reflect yours)
That experience shattered my idea that the world was being operated by competent engineers and technicians, governed by sane policies, under the watchful care of good, knowledgable people.
The world is held together by beliefs and expectations and bubblegum and duct tape, and a few thousand people madly scrambling to keep it all running.
Sounds like the AWS experience
Reminds me the amount of debt that exists only as an entry in an excel spreadsheets somewhere. No database with high availability and regular backups and audit logs and access control and all of that, just a spreadsheet.
At least in case of VPN you only tunnel then-encrypted (in most cases) traffic to servers - so at worst case you at least have protection of ssh/https
I have seen shit that would turn you white.
For the OP/others, it would be great if folks can share what they do to secure their environments, with or without a jump box.
I've worked at a couple places where prod is air-gapped except for the bastion host that allows access to prod. But the bastion itself is still behind a vpn. And of course each user still has separate user accounts on both the bastion box and prod boxes.
I can definitely see your point though that a bastion/jumpbox isn't enough by itself.
I used to work for a company who allowed SSH only after jumping through Citrix => RDP => Putty => Jumphost => Target server.
Incredibly painful, also considering that each layer had a different keymap
I tried to look at the documentation but was left with more questions, the "free" version mentions "Linux server" (not even the GNU utilities?) and is just available as a curl | bash (but the apparently targets RHEL, Suse, Debian/Ubuntu and Alpine) and I started to glance through the git
"mysqldump -uroot -h127.0.0.1 -p jumpserver -P3307"
I think I'll stick with wireguard, headscale, netbird or tailscale, depending on scenario.
It's not so much about the remote access as it is about control and auditing.
i.e. ability to permit/deny certain commands/behaviours, and a complete audit log of the session, sometimes extending to a screen recording of an rdp session.
I think it is more about paying someone else for “security” than whatever the product actually is and does.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/jumpcloud-bre...
(side note: always say the attackers were from North Korea.)
There is nothing immune to breaches and NK has some of the best and most persistent State-backed cybersecurity threats in the world.
I can't tell if this app supports that without digging through the docs (that don't seem to exist) or the code (that I don't care to browse), but that's how a typical zerotrust deployment works.
I doubt that is anywhere near of "safe to use".
This is for creating extremely fined grained permissions, controls, and auditing between users, devices, applications, and infrastructure, bound with IAM.
Like you can give Sarah access with her Passkey to port 4345 on Sunday to 6 of the 47 network switches, but only if she logs in from the EU with her Pixel device using a particular app and hits the Swedish network entry point.
We used it a lot at first, but as our setup got more mature we rarely needed to SSH to our application servers/containers.
In my current project, I did not even setup smth like this.