I wish this trend of “security through obscurity” should mean that all info should just be exposed would die, its silly and lacks basis in reality.
Even within infosec, certain types of information disclosure are considered security problems. Leaking signed up user information or even inodes on the drives can lead to PCI-DSS failures.
Why is broadcasting your records treated differently? Because people would find the information eventually if they scanned the whole internet? Even then they might not due to SNI; so this is actually giving critical information necessary for an attack to attackers.
The issue is not that obscurity per se is bad, but relying _only_ on obscurity is absolute the same as not having any security measures at all.
With the public ledger or not, you will still need to implement proper security measures. So it shouldn't matter if your address is public or not, in fact making it public raises the awareness for the problem. That's the argument.
Until it gets obscure enough that we start calling it “public-key cryptography”. Guess the prime number I'm thinking of between 0 and 2↑4096 and win a fabulous prize!
If you replace "security by obscurity" with "Kerckhoffs's principle", yes, absolutely!
The problem with using regular everyday obscurity is that it usually has a small state space and makes for terrible security, but people will treat it like it is cleverly hidden and safe from attackers
If I guess the IPv4 you're thinking of between 0 and 2↑32, ready or not, you win a free port scan
> So it shouldn't matter if your address is public or not, in fact making it public raises the awareness for the problem. That's the argument.
Forget about the internet, we've had almost 100 years to prove we can secure identity theft. And the best thing we can do is to keep our SSN's secret -- security through obscurity. Keeping your SSN private reduces your personal attack surface.
We've had 50 years to secure the internet, and yet, we still have zero day attacks. Nuclear submarines try their best to keep their locations a secret? Why? You cannot attack something you cannot see or hear.
Battleship sounds like a good analogy, but is very different because you don't have other options to "secure your ship" besides obscurity. If you had other options, let's say a sonar or moving your ship, they would definitely be used along with obscurity.
Besides, the time to scan the whole board is too time consuming in a battleship game, but scanning the whole internet on the other hand only take a few minutes[1]
You're talking IPv4 here, not IPv6. A 24 bit network has 254 addresses in IPv4. A 64bit subnet in IPv6 has 2^64.
If you can scan 1M ipv6's in a second, you can maybe scan 1 subnet in 584,942 years.
So if you're a firewall, and you notice scanning from a particular ip or network, it's easy enough to block them.
Also if you are scanning IPv4, you're not scanning addresses behind the NAT'd routers -- which is also effectively a form of obfuscation. So I would argue it's not the entire internet.
Okay, but we're not talking about that here. This is very much the case of a service being exposed that shouldn't be and relying on obscurity to try and avoid actually getting compromised
If something was temporary then it’s likely that it wouldn’t have been found in a meaningful amount of time to be exploited.
As an only line of defence it’s not good, but its also not good to hand-deliver your entire personal information to fraudsters and then claim that the systems should be more robust.
If you have a target on your own back thanks to cert transparency logs, it's a bit like closing the barn door late for you to find fault in your own being in Texas when sharpshooters are about. If your only defense was obscurity, your ass is hanging out, and it's no one's fault but your own when you find fault with others for simply saying so.
IME, moving ssh off the standard port reduces bot scanning traffic by >99%. Not only it means less noise in the logs (and thus higher SNR), but also lowers the chance you're hit by spray-and-pray in case there's a zero day in sshd (or any other daemon really).
True, but I hardly open any ssh to the wide world. I would only allow it inside a closed network anyways. HTTP on the other hand _needs_ to be exposed on 80 or 443 (not technically, but in practice)
The context of the conversation is that the address becomes publicly visible so you get hit with port scanners and script kiddies looking for vulns. Moving off standard ports does help but many of those are also going to look at ports like 2222 or 8022 and treat them as ssh.
It's not hard to just send something like `nmap -sV -p- <ADDRESS>` (or better, use like rustscan.) and you'll discover those ports and the services.
On the other hand, just install something like knocked and you don't have to do much. Knocking is not a difficult thing to set up.
Which is something that makes a notable difference. It’s telling the bots the OP listed are trying Vite endpoints, they’re targeting folks doing short term local web development. Removing obscurity and indicating relative likelihood of still being online is a big shift.
