[HamWAN PSDR] We need to design secure control access

[Stephen Kangas]

Ok, Bart, since there are now others putting their hands up to help, I'll do that same since the work load and hive brain will be spread around.

In addition to having a MS in Cyber Security & Information Assurance, my previous BSIT was with Security Emphasis, and I have several security and network routing & switching certs, including CEH & Forensics Investigator, and if there's some Linux behind the curtain I can help CLI and security for that, also.  I've also become somewhat MicroTik Router OS fluent since doing HamWAN, and have since used their products in other network installs.  My consulting workload will distract me some, but I'm willing to volunteer some time to help out, just let me know if you need it.

Tell me more about the loss of your source code, exactly how did that happen?  Perhaps it can be recovered.

Stephen W9SK


-----Original Message-----
From: PSDR <psdr-bounces at hamwan.org> On Behalf Of Bart Kus
Sent: Wednesday, February 08, 2023 3:34 AM
To: Puget Sound Data Ring <psdr at hamwan.org>
Subject: [HamWAN PSDR] We need to design secure control access

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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