To mitigate the effort to maintain my personal server, I am considering to only expose ssh port to the outside and use its socks proxy to reach other services. is Portknocking enough to reduce surface of attack to the minimum?
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just use tailscale
Other then the slowly increasing log file (if you use fail2ban for example), it will take thousands of years to actually hack you through this method as long as root auth is disabled and authentication is only via SSH keys, I wouldn’t worry about it.
It is possible to tighten the security of a machine to the point it is no longer usable. It is important to secure our devices but we cannot forget about convenience, so the trick is to tighten it but also make it so you don’t have to jump through a number of hoops till you get to your destination.
I for example, wouldn’t use your method because it would make it difficult to use some services I host from my phone.
Port knockers for the most part aren’t worrying. In an ideal situation, the only ports that should be open are 22, 80, 443 and using a reverse proxy to mask headers. (Poor configuration for example, go to Shodan and type bitwarden in the search bar and see how many people expose their instances to the world carelessly without an SSL cert) and the occasional UDP for game servers/media servers.
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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption UDP User Datagram Protocol, for real-time communications VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
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I used to SSH into my server and proxy out from there. Then I learned how shit of a solution that is for daily use and set up a vpn like a normal person.
Instead of ssh I use wireguard directly. It’s a simple protocol based on public/private keys with great performance and security.
Wireguard is stateless and establishes connections really quickly on demand. This means the battery isn’t impacted even though it’s always on, since the VPN doesn’t have to maintain a constant connection. At least that’s the case if your routing only a specific subnet (e.g. 192.168.1.0/24 and not all traffic through it 0.0.0.0/0).
I use a vps running openvps. Then i only allow ssh access from my vpn ip address.
What kind of port knocking just going to ports in sequence? Or someone wrote one that looks for a key signed and is supposedly not replayable.
