How do we know if there aren't a bunch of more undetected backdoors?
https://lemdro.id/post/7709696
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Good question. I have asking myself the same thing as well. In case of ssh it is possible to use 2FA with a security key, which is something I’d like to put in my todo.txt
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you don’t and will never will. I would recommend reading a lecture by Ken Thompson the co-creator of Unix for more details on this cs.cmu.edu/…/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingT…
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Self hosting personal photos doesn’t generally require opening anything up to the internet, so most backdoors would not be accessible by anyone but you.
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Or someone who has penetrated your network.
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Of which the chances are slim to none for 99% of people simply because they aren’t interesting enough to be a target beyond phishing, scans, and broad attacks.
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We don’t know. However, no one cares about your personal photos ; no one will ever attempt to hack you specifically unless you’re a high value target (in which case, stop hosting your photos anywhere immediately)
The only thing that could get your photos is if an undiscovered backdoor is exploited by someone doing some sort of a mass attack. As far as I know, they’re pretty rare, because people with the means to do them generally have a specific set of people they care about (which you are unlikely to be a part of).
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We don’t know. However, no one cares about your personal photos ;
no one will ever attempt to hack you specifically unless you’re a high value target
(in which case, stop hosting your photos anywhere immediately)
To those assumptions I would say : we don’t know.
Personal vendettas do exist and we cannot look into the minds of individuals going crazy neither.
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That fair enough I guess, really depends on what kinda personal photos you have. I know people are worried about revenge porn, I personally think the only actual remedy is not having any porn of yourself anywhere unless it’s your job 🤷🏻♀️
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unfortunately, mass atracks happen all the time. if you ever had access to the authentication logs of an SSH server with an unfirewalled port 22 into the internet that has been running for a few months, you would see international IPs starting port scans and brute force attacks. there is always someone out there trying to hack random IPs. it’s fucking wild west out there.
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Yeah. I’d recommend using ssh keys and disabling password authentication whenever something is exposed to a public network
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no one will ever attempt to hack you
My brother in Christ, how do you think botnets get built?
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They did say specifically. I think bothers are usually automated attacks.
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My ssh auth logs show a lot of login attempts from chinese IPs. That prompted me to install Fail2Ban…
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We don’t know. But if there were well known backdoors to mainstream security practices we might see more companies that depend on security shutting down, or at least shutting down their online activities. Banks, stock trading, crypto exchanges, other enterprises that handle money, where hacking would be lucrative.
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I don’t think you need to worry about backdoors with most of those. Worry more about unfixed security holes due to an extreme emphasis on “stability” as in using old versions when fixes have already been released when it comes to anything hosted by large companies.
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There’s a concept of acceptable levels of risk. Companies are not going to shut down out of fear, or miss out on the business opportunities of online presence. There’s money to be made.
Even with things as serious as spectre allowing full dumping of CPU and RAM contents simply by loading a website, I can’t think of a single company that just said “well shit, better just die”.
Serious, potentially business ending, security issues usually have a huge amount of effort when discovered put into mitigations and fixes. Mitigations are usually enough in the immediate “oh shit” phase. Defense in depth is standard practice.
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There are several known instaces of crypto exchages getting hacked.
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“We don’t” is the short answer. It’s unfortunate, but true.
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While others are saying “no one cares about your personal photos” personal info is not the target of backdoor attacks like this. It’s more likely an attempt to get access to lots of processing power for a crypto mine or botnet.
It’s best practice to have the minimum packages required to run whatever service you are running, don’t add other stuff that you won’t be using. Using a distro that is “outdated” like Debian stable can help since the packages have had more time out in the wild to be tested.
I am sure that the xz incident has raised a lot of alarms across many projects.
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As many have pointed out, you don’t know that there is not a back door in your software.
One way to defend against such an unknown is to have a method of quickly reinstalling your system, so if you ever suspect you have been compromised you can reload your OS from scratch and reconfigure it with minimal fuss. This is one reason I recommend folks learn one of the configuration management systems like ansible or puppet, and use those to configure your Linux servers. Having config management also helps you recover anfter unexpected hardware failures.
Defense is done in layers. No one layer will protect you 100%. Build up several layers that you trust and understand.
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Very good points.
Call me paranoid but i always fear I might fail to notice the symptoms of something nasty going on.
I wish linux had a built-in, easy-to-use auditing/alerting system. I know this can be achived by experts but others have no idea what’s actually going on on their machines.
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Dude, you’re so not paranoid. This stuff has happened to me. I had a Wordpress blog that was hacked and the exploit was stored in the DB so even after reloading the OS I still was infected because I hadn’t sanitized my database. Luckily it was just Google viagra spam, and it was a valuable lesson.
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That’s the neat part, we don’t!
…but, we at least can have a shot of finding them.
In the meantime, I’d advise you to keep an eye out and maybe look into threat models. As people said in this thread already, bad actors probably don’t care about your personal photos.
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Unless OP is a celebrity or politician. Or knows they have an enemy with the resources to find and exploit potential backdoors.
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You never know what security holes exist until they’re exploited. Nothing you can really do about that. Security and convenience have always, and will always, be a trade off and a matter of personal acceptability. If you host anything, it will be potentially vulnerable, way less so if you take proper precautions. If you’re not just overtly insecure, you’ll probably be fine, but there’s no way to say for sure.
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That’s the neat part, you don’t. However if you stay up to date it is not a big deal.
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Well not too up to date as we just have witnessed 😁
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Just use a stable system
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The main solace you can take is how quickly xz was caught: there is a lot of diverse scrutiny on it.
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Hmm, not really. It’s only because it nerd-sniped someone who was trying to do something completely unrelated that this came to light. If that person has been less dedicated or less skilled we’d still probably be in the dark.
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Call me names… But sometimes the story has far more branched and backstories than they actual will shed into light.
Trust nobody, not even yourself.
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The thing is there are a few thousand of those people
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Maybe millions of potential eyes, but all of them are looking at other things! Heartbleed existed for two years before being noticed, and OpenSSL must have enormously more scrutiny than small projects like xz.
I am very pro open source and this investigation would’ve been virtually impossible on Windows or Mac, but the many-eyes argument always struck me as more theoretical/optimistic than realistic.
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Heartbleed existed for two years before being noticed
That’s a different scenario. That was an inadvertently introduced bug, not a deliberately installed backdoor. So the bad guys didn’t have two years to exploit it because they didn’t know about it either.
It’s also not new that very old bugs get discovered. Just a few years ago a 24 year old bug was discovered in the Linux kernel.
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And are bugs harder to find than carefully hidden backdoors? No-one noticed the code being added and if it hadn’t have had a performance penalty then it probably wouldn’t have been discovered for a very long time, if ever.
The flip side to open-source is that bad actors could have reviewed the code, discovered Heartbleed and been quietly exploiting it without anyone knowing. Government agencies and criminal groups are known to horde zero-days.
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You don’t. Hackers often exploit things like this for ages before they are found. Every bit of non simple software also has bugs.
But chances are you won’t be the target.
Just keep everything updated and you should be alright.
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And implement least privilege with ACL and firewalls
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There probably are, there’s a reason why super high security systems aim for airgapping of sorts, and even that’s not immune.
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The alternative is you could use a Windows server… Bear in mind a lot of code for windows is private and isn’t open to scrutiny from the public so chances are there could possibly be built-in backdoors no one is aware of except for Microsoft or there are backdoors which are only known to a hacker who’s discovered them.
The recent xz backdoor, I think is a stellar example of how powerful open source software can be, a community came together and noticed this in such a short period of time and had a way to quickly resolve this without this being a large scale issue, looking back at things like Log4j which caused so much pain across the entire industry, we are so lucky to have open source software communities.
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This was likely a state-sponsored attack. If your SSH isn’t exposed to the internet this probably wouldn’t have effected you. Also most people run stable distros like Debian on their server, and this particular vulnerability never made it to the stable branch. I would guess that most of the computers you have ever used have backdoors. Even if you run Linux (which may itself have some) you might still have a proprietary UEFI on your motherboard. Something like xz wouldn’t effect you because no government really cares what’s on your server. Smaller attacks can be avoided through common sense. Some people will expose services that require zero authentication to the internet. Follow basic best practices and you will probably be fine.
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We can’t know. If we would know, those weren’t undetected backdoors at all. It’s not possible to know something you don’t know. So the question in itself is a paradox. :D The question is not if there are backdoors, but if the most critical software is infected? At least what I ask myself.
Do you backups man, do not install too many stuff, do not trust everyone, use multiple mail accounts and passwords and 2 factor authentication. We can only try to minimize the effects of when something horrible happens. Maybe support the projects you like, so that more people can help and have more eyes on it. Governments and corporations with money could do that as well, if they care.
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if you are self hosting and enjoy over-engineering systems… VLANS, ACLs between subnets and IDS/IPS should be part of.your thinking. separate things into zones of vulnerability / least-privilege and maintain that separation with an iron fist. this is a great rabbit hole to fall down if you have the time. however, given a skilled adversary with enough time and money, any network can be infiltrated eventually. the idea is to try to minimize the exposure when it happens.
if the above is not a part of your daily thinking, then don’t worry about it too much. use a production OS like Debian stable, don’t expose ports to the public internet and only allow systems that should initiate communication to the internet to actually do so (preferably only on their well known protocol ports - if possible).
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We don’t. That’s why we use multiple layers of security. For example keeping all services accessible only via VPN and using a major OS that a lot of production workloads depend on such as Debian, Ubuntu LTS or any of the RHEL copycats. This is a huge plus of the free tier of Ubuntu Pro BTW. It’s commercial level security support for $0. Using any of these OSes means that the time between a vulnerability being discovered, latched and deployed is as small as possible. Of course you have to have automatic security updates turned on, unattended-upgrades in Debian-speak.
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You can’t trust any of it to be totally secure, it’s effectively impossible. But, this is true of all software, at least open source is being audited and scrutinised all the time (as demonstrated).
All you can do is follow best practices.
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I’m not a security specialist either. I learn new things every day, but this is why my NextCloud is accessible through TailScale only and I have zero ports exposed to the outside world.
The only real convenience I lose is being able to say “check out this thing on my personal server” with a link to someone outside my network, but that’s easily worked around.
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Next: how do we know tailscale’s network hasn’t been backdoored?
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Headscale. And then you don’t even have to trust any outside auth provider to not log in in your name.
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I figure there’s a certain amount of trust you have to have in strangers for a LOT of things we use every day.
I try to be selective with where I put that trust, especially when I can’t just homebrew an advanced custom solution, but I figure Tailscale is much better than attempting to just host it on my LAN with an open a port to the big scary web and hope a bot doesn’t find a gap and ransomware it all lol.
3-2-1 backups and a certain bit of trust.
Because heck, even CPUs have been found with exploitable microcode. (Spectre and Meltdown?) At some point you just gotta balance “best rational protection” with not going insane, right?
Headscale below is pretty neat too, but I feel like spinning up Dockers on Proxmox and Tailscale is as much moving parts as I’m willing to manage alongside everything else in life. :)
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I think you can use Tailscale Funnels for that.
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I would say you can’t, but if you are using open source software, then somebody can and will find them eventually and they will be patched. Unlike with closed source software, you will never know if it has a backdoor or not. This whole episode shows both the problems with open source, being lack of funding for security audits, and the beauty of open source, being that eventually it will be detected and removed.
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Security is not a wall. It is a maze.
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Reading the source code for everything running on your machine and then never updating is the only way to be absolutely 100% sure.
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Even with that you will miss something
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This is a sliver of one patch, there is a bug here that disabled a build tool that breaks the attack. Can you find it?
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::: spoiler hint
It is one singular character. Everything else is fine. :::
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Solution
It’s the dot on line 9
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::: Maybe the answer but most likely it is wrong
Is it the dot after include
:::
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I do IT security for a living. It is quite complicated but not unrealistic for you to DIY.
Do a risk assessment first off - how important is your data to you and a hostile someone else? Outputs from the risk assessment might be fixing up backups first. Think about which data might be attractive to someone else and what you do not want to lose. Your photos are probably irreplaceable and your password spreadsheet should probably be a Keepass database. This is personal stuff, work out what is important.
After you’ve thought about what is important, then you start to look at technologies.
Decide how you need to access your data, when off site. I’ll give you a clue: VPN always until you feel proficient to expose your services directly on the internet. IPSEC or OpenVPN or whatevs.
After sorting all that out, why not look into monitoring?
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Fun fact, you can use let’s encrypt certs on a internal environment. All you need is a domain.
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Just be aware that its an information leakage (all your internal DNS names will be public)
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