points by femiagbabiaka 2 days ago | 0 comments
> I can get away with exposing a port on my router
using wireguard is awesome, but I wouldn't say deploying and maintaining it lacks complexity exactly. and you didn't get rid of attack surface, you just made it your responsibility ;)
[–] LoganDark 2 days ago
Attack surface almost entirely goes away if you just require a good port knock first! I do that with my protection SSH servers and it works just fine. Also prevents anyone from knowing there even is an SSH server there. Or any server if it doesn't respond to pings either, and only uses reverse tunnels to accept public connections
[–] neilalexander 2 days ago
Wireguard doesn’t respond to malformed packets or handshakes from unknown devices by design.
[–] LoganDark 2 days ago
Oh, awesome!
[–] mbreese 2 days ago
Is there a way to automate port knocks in your .ssh/config? I think that’s the main reason why I haven’t added it to my home server.
[–] LoganDark 2 days ago
Technically you could use a ProxyCommand that does the knock and then runs nc to your target.
[–] lakeviewterrace 2 days ago
Port knocking is idiotic and amounts to Biff Tannen's "only I know how to start this car".
[–] Gigachad 2 days ago
Dunno, in combination with having an up to date system following best practices, port knocking is probably going to save you when bots start scanning the internet with the next SSH 0day. Any amount of friction will cause the bots to move to the next IP address.
[–] icedchai 2 days ago
Just moving SSH off a default port gets you 98% there.
[–] LoganDark 2 days ago
An attacker only has to get lucky once, so while I do put SSH on a non-default port too, it's not enough to avoid attacks on its own.
[–] icedchai 2 days ago
I mostly do it to quiet down the noise from the non-stop bots and scanners.
[–] LoganDark 2 days ago
Being off the IPv4 space completely can be even more effective at that, FWIW, but that can have other issues. Only feasible for some!
[–] esseph 2 days ago
LLMs port knock for redteam scans. Have for a long time.
[–] LoganDark 2 days ago
My knock for SSH was 20 ports within 2 seconds. knockd resets the sequence if you hit any of its ports out of order. I generated the sequence with a CSPRNG.
[–] esseph 2 days ago
That's not a knock, it's a password :-)
[–] LoganDark 2 days ago
I mean, it suffers from some of the same issues with knocks, like being replayable. Wonder if anyone's come up with a TOTP-like thing for port knocks, where the code changes every little bit...
[–] LoganDark 2 days ago
It's more like "only I know how to find this keyhole". You still need the key then, you're just also adding some defense against picking.
It would be idiotic to use the knock as the only authentication, which is why I don't.
To be quite honest, I just like the aesthetics of it.
[–] megous 2 days ago
You're sending your knock over the public network in the clear. It's observable by anything in the path. And then you're not the only one that can find the keyhole.
[–] sersi 2 days ago
Entirely true, it's not true security, same as changing the ssh port. So, relying on it for any security is not useful but it's a good deterrent from automated scans that are not targeted towards you. Defense in depth means not necessarily discarding flawed defenses if they are in addition to proper defense.
[–] swingandamiss 2 days ago
With AI, the complexity doesn't really matter anymore. Codex or Claude can easily configure complex site-to-site setups and peer configurations on mobile devices. I did this by hand before and it was hard and difficult to get right. Now I just tell AI and it does so perfectly, checks and verifies things. AI made life so easy.
[–] drum55 2 days ago
No amount of claude can handle the key thing that Tailscale fixes about wireguard, all of the connection to connection logic is handled be it direct, via all sorts of weird hole punching or via relays. Wireguard itself is horrible to do this with, half the time you're just looking at `wg status` wondering why the packet counter isn't incrementing today. It can never achieve the magic that is a direct connection between plane wifi and a host that's behind NAT on the ground.
[–] hdgvhicv 2 days ago
I can’t think of a single time I’ve wanted to connect between two hosts when I haven’t specifically allowed one through a firewall
[–] drum55 2 days ago
NAT are not firewalls.
[–] hdgvhicv 1 day ago
Functionally they are. Allow traffic aiming at this address and this port to arrive on this server.
Not that my WireGuard connection needs nat as it terminates on my router. And I use private ip ranges as I want to be sure that if WireGuard drops out for some reason traffic doesn’t route over the unencrypted path. Defence in depth.
[–] arcanemachiner 2 days ago
This is true, but I still wouldn't discount the possibility of mistakes. It's good to know how your home network works. Even Opus 5.5 can make some pretty dumb mistakes, particularly if it doesn't have the full picture.
[–] swingandamiss 2 days ago
Humans also make mistakes. At this point, I trust AI more than humans when it comes to casually configuring VPNs. I've read many who exposed things by mistake on reddit. AI has nearly solved this, probably is a solved issue at this point.
[–] femiagbabiaka 2 days ago
I would not personally expose my devices over a VPN that I self-hosted and set up purely through AI unless I felt like I understood how it worked completely. But that's probably just personal paranoia.
[–] swingandamiss 2 days ago
Just go read reddit threads on people who do this by hand following half baked guides. There's a huge population doing this, now everyone is switching to AI. It's a big win and safer. Not everyone is a trained network engineer, but now they are with AI
[–] LeBit 2 days ago
It makes no sense at all to configure a >3 nodes wireguard setup with straight wireguard.
Wireguard is the building block for higher level tools like Tailscale to build on.
[–] ectospheno 2 days ago