PHP, TLS, etc… We appear to be facing a tsunami of vulnerabilities being discovered in record time. Further, the window to act on these vulnerabilities has basically closed to zero; hackers’ tools now automatically fold the very latest vulnerabilities into their botnets within minutes/hours of discovery. I have always been extremely reluctant to expose any of my services - even with the latest and greatest security tools. My choice to stay totally within the confines of tailscale seems vindicated given this week’s news. How are you all taking this?
I only have a VPN endpoint exposed. If I need to access any of my web services I simply VPN in and away I go.
I completely folded all services to the “inside”.
I still do, but I don’t host anything on 80 or 443. I use a random large port number, and I’ve seen zero illegitimate requests in 20 months.
IF there’s an active exploit AND it affects a container AND you have a container escape route AND you pick my domain you’d need to statistically try thousands of times to even hit the single open NAT port.
I also practice domain/IP obfuscation in addition to high port:
- TLS certs are wildcard certs, so bots can’t get my subdomains from transparency logs.
- My DDNS IP is on a subdomain (random string) not on the base domain.
- My public services are also on random subdomains, CNAME’d individually to the IP subdomain.
- There is no wildcard CNAME that the bots can query to get the IP.
This eliminates scanning almost completely. They can’t find an IP to go with my base domain, first of all. And even if a bot is scanning the IPv4 address space and all the ports and it finds the reverse proxy it can’t get past it without knowing a FQDN. I still get the occasional hit from such bots but it’s very rare.
Also, all my public services are secured with mTLS (preferably) or at the very least a long key in a custom HTTP header (both enforced at the proxy).
Thank you for sharing this, vey insightful
How do u use a port other than 443 for https. AFAICT all web browsers are pinned to it (for ssl checks I think) and I could never get an actual https connection through an alt port. Maybe I didn’t understand it properly.
Edit: I think actually it’s the auto cert provisioning workflow. The CA I’m signing against hardcodes port 443 :/
Edit, edit: this was the issue https://caddy.community/t/non-standard-ports-for-https/6916/4
The API based challenges are better since you don’t even need to make the site externally accessible to get certificates.
Let’s encrypt and similar services support those and for popular registrars (aws, porkbun, etc,) here are existing plugins for caddy, swag (nginx proxy with built in cert support) and a few others.
Yeah, if you use something like Nginx Proxy Manager you can’t use the automatic flow, you need to use the token based challenge.
Boo, no idea why acme forces these specific ports. Swapping them seems like a pretty basic obfuscation technique that could help a lot to secure any services.
Edit: actually seems like this might be possible with the dns challenge type. I’m gonna test this out later https://github.com/caddy-dns/porkbun
Answering the titular question, why would the advent of AI-found vulnerabilities substantially change one’s threat model? Before LLMs, the prospect of an undiscovered vulnerability was non-zero probability then, so what exactly has changed now?
In terms of attacker capabilities, it would be a mistake to solely observe that attackers now have LLMs and conclude that this means the threat landscape has changed. The use of LLMs does not magically create a root escalation where one does not or cannot exist. Part of your threat model should include defense-in-depth mitigations, so that when (not if) an attacker finds a 0-day exploit, they are severely limited in gained functionality on your machines. In the simplest cases, jails or containers serve to keep separate the web-facing processes. VM isolation would be a further step, because an attacked cannot gain machine control without both a software exploit as well as a VM escape route. People hosting services can and should expect that their front line defense will fall, so they better have more defenses in place.
Phrased another way, the people who have done their threats analysis properly and have accepted the residual risk of hosting their own services that face the web, should not really be additionally perturbed by AI advances. This isn’t the same caliber of landscape change as would, say, the invention of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer. If the worst thing that can happen to your home IRC server is that it gets flooded by a script kiddie, AI does not mean your server can now burst into flames.
Much like with human hygiene, some basic rules are unusually effective against most threats. The equivalent to washing one’s hands is to stay on top of system and software updates. Institutionally funding the organizations (eg PHP Foundation, curl, USA CDC) so they can fix these problems would also help.
Before LLMs, the prospect of an undiscovered vulnerability was non-zero probability then, so what exactly has changed now?
The problem is not the prospect of an undiscovered vulnerability (there is always a vulnerability somewhere) but rather the prospect of a reduced response window.
There’s a wide gap of difference between “non-zero probability” (0.0076%) and “non-zero probability” (82.01734%).
If you’re dealing in probabilities, that’s not threat modeling; it might be in the larger umbrella of risk management though. Defining a threat model means to qualify what sort of attacker you expect to face and what they are assumed to be capable of. An assumption such as “this adversary can send arbitrary packets to the public IP address” is what would be documented in a threat model.
The raison d’etre of threat modeling is to methodically tackle the actual or assumed risks that an attacker can pose against you. It is not an exercise in swinging at shadows, though I wouldn’t discourage overstating the capabilities of an attacker, if needing to protect assets like patient info or PII. Doing threat modeling based on “gut feeling” is a recipe for not recognizing risk where it’s present and seeing risk when there isn’t any.
The fact remains: you cannot squeeze blood from a stone. Even the most sophisticated AI cannot steal PII from a computer that doesn’t store PII. Proper threat modeling means you don’t put anything on the line that you haven’t squared up against the risks, however improbable. For any non-zero concern, a good threat model will discuss its mitigation, whether it will be absorbed, or if it is an open question. For an out-of-scope concern, a good threat model will explicitly state that assumption.
Defining a threat model means to qualify what sort of attacker you expect to face and what they are assumed to be capable of
Which is exactly what OP is talking about. 5 years ago if you were only trying to defend against script kiddies, using containers was good enough. But now you have to consider that script kiddies might find container escapes.
Hasn’t changed much. I have accepted the risk and, for now, the desire to have publicly accessible stuff outweights my lack of desire to deal with the realities of a VPN. I mean, I want to share stuff with others, and I want to be hosting it myself because I have grown to distrust someone else’s service… so what else can I do but risk it?
Besides: I expect tailscale or the underlying VPN services to already be a target. I would be surprised if they don’t find anything. What then?
If they find anything we fix it, update our services, and move on.
The chances of being hit by a zero-day as a random self-hoster are very small, but anyway if you keep backups and can restore a clean state (and patch your system) you should be good.
The goal is not to have perfect security, it’s to mitigate the risks and to handle fallout correctly.
exposure is unchanged. automated patching and upgrades are working. rollbacks, etc are working. minimal attack surface exposed and properly blocking traffic by geography. rotation of keys/passwords as well as short lived rotated TLS certs.
not one of those things alone is a solution, but together can make a solid dent in securing your infrastructure.
I moved to closing everything down and wireguarding in to home 5 years ago and I’m glad I did. I only expose game server these days which have a different vuln profile.
If/when I open up for Jellyfin/etc, I’ll probably run them on a different box to my NAS in a DMZ with strong firewall rules. And use a VPS for anything else that doesn’t require NAS storage to reduce blast radius.
Can we go back to late 90s internet yet?
I’ve always treated my home server with public facing services as presumptively compromised. I don’t put any data on there I wouldn’t want to see become public, and any data I actually care about losing is backed up to the cloud with an append-only key. The NixOS config lives in a git repo not on the server. If something bad happens, I can wipe the machine clean, redeploy the image, restore my backups, and we’re back to the status quo.
So, my threat model hasn’t changed much!
not at home but i work as a software dev for a very big company you heard of and all we do noe is fix ai found security bugs. hell the stuff i work on isnt that public and we are still fixing. i can only imagine what the team of the public website are handling.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CA (SSL) Certificate Authority Git Popular version control system, primarily for code NAS Network-Attached Storage NAT Network Address Translation SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) nginx Popular HTTP server
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The only thing I have exposed is my VPN, so no change here.
I have HTTP(s) exposed, plus a wireguard port. HTTP points at a traefik gateway running in a kubernetes environment, based on hardened talos and using cilium network policies to isolate and direct traffic. I know that I am not super safe, but given this weeks news I think the only way to be truly safe in terms of cybersecurity is to use paper notebooks, snail mail and a subscription to the local print newspaper and no digital services whatsoever. In other words: how certain can we be that tailscale, or wireguard in general, or any other securit tool isn‘t suddenly at risk? Can we live with that risk? There always was a trade-off you had to make. Unfortunately „just use lets-encrypt, fail2ban and key-auth for ssh“ isn‘t really cutting it anymore.
I had a public facing jellyfin. I took it down because of that [ai].
Immich and nextcloud are still up.
I’m not saying there is a rational reasoning behind it.
My public facing server uses a wildcard domain cert plus it’s hosted on an uncommon higher port. It only serves static pages. My SSH port is hidden behind a WireGuard connection. I keep it extremely simple because simple is easy to maintain.
I don’t expose much, just an always-on VPN. My HTML only site lives on vps, from which i can cut-and-run anytime. I don’t have much need for more, really.
Back when I was working more with raw infosec stuff like packet analysis, etc, I thought surely we would see machine learning in every router to dynamically manage firewalls in such a way that they became foregone conclusions. We don’t really have that, but code has sure changed, and you’re right, we will see lots more vulns discovered and exploited at a much faster pace.
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