[HamWAN PSDR] We need to design secure control access

[Doug Kingston]

As I am retiring from the Goog on Friday, I will have more time to get
involved in this project.  Count me in.

-Doug-

On Wed, Feb 8, 2023 at 8:09 AM Stephen Kangas <stephen at kangas.com> wrote:

> Hear, hear, Bart!  As an infosec pro, I was a bit appalled after first
> installing HamWAN and seeing such lax security, akin to leaving the front
> door open all day&nite of your house in Sodo.  I removed the remote access
> and reporting configuration from my client nodes for this reason, but now I
> hear the control nodes have their doors open?  Recipe for disaster and
> subsequent need for DR that can be prevented.
>
> Stephen W9SK
>
>
> On February 8, 2023 3:34:17 AM Bart Kus <me at bartk.us> wrote:
>
> All of the network's control points are on public non-firewalled IPs.
>> This is the worst security.  It was done this way for the sake of
>> simplicity.  Our netops volunteers had to get up to speed with
>> unfamiliar concepts like routing, funky netmasks, dynamic routing
>> protocols, policy routing, VRRP, firewalls, MTUs, MSS control, IPsec,
>> etc.  We reaped the rewards of KISS from broader volunteer engagement,
>> but lately we've been paying too heavy of a price for the awful security
>> this simplicity creates.  In the most recent breach we've lost important
>> source code that will now need to be re-created.  We escaped total
>> disaster by the thinnest of margins, as one critical hypervisor just
>> happened to be patched to 1 version higher than exploitable.  This
>> simplicity is not a good tradeoff anymore, so the time has come to
>> introduce more complexity to the network to protect all control points.
>>
>> This is not a simple problem, since there are many fragility vs security
>> tradeoffs, as well as complexity cost concerns.  If you have experience
>> or thoughts around this area, and can commit to a few weeks of design
>> and implementation work on this project, please indicate your interest.
>> We'll assemble a small working group in the next few days and start
>> discussions.  I expect the working format will involve some virtual
>> meetings, since email is not high bandwidth enough to hash out
>> everything quickly.
>>
>> Here's hoping we don't make it worse,
>>
>> --Bart
>>
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>> http://mail.hamwan.net/mailman/listinfo/psdr
>>
>
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