Richard Bejtlich References Single Packet Authorization
20 April, 2007
Richard Bejtlich, founder of TaoSecurity, has made a
posting
to his blog that references
Single Packet Authorization in the context of making it more difficult to discover
and communicate with SSHD from arbitrary IP addresses. One of the points he makes in his
blog posting is that it is important to force a would-be attacker to fight your fight
instead of allowing an attacker to dictate the stage on which a battle is fought. For
example, if an attacker possesses a zero-day exploit for SSHD, then the mere ability
to access SSHD from an arbitrary source is taking a dangerous risk. One of Richard's
readers posted a particularly cogent comment about the concept of "security through
obscurity":
As for changing the port for SSH - my belief is that at times we get so hung up on the tags - "security by obscurity" that we cease to see the valid strategies that they can cover. Simply because we denigrate the people who rely solely on it doesn't mean that it isn't part of a valid defensive scheme.
I completely agree. Fortunately however, Single Packet Authorization does not suffer from security through obscurity. SPA essentially ties access through a default-drop packet filter to a protected service via strong cryptographic means. A nice byproduct of this is that services are not advertised to the world, but this is a consequence of the default-drop packet filter. The security of SPA does not rely on keeping the mechanism secret and hoping that it is not discovered; all source code to every SPA implementation that I am aware of is open and published to the world. SPA is no more security through obscurity than passwords or encryption algorithms themselves.
