Kata1yst

joined 2 years ago
[–] Kata1yst@kbin.social 12 points 6 months ago

Nah. Derision, public shaming, and ostracism are fundamental to the maintenance of the social contract. How else can we moderate extremists? The denazification of Germany was effective because they didn't shy away from these methods.

[–] Kata1yst@kbin.social 7 points 6 months ago

Yes...? All are except Microsoft, which is why most companies I work with aren't looking that way.

[–] Kata1yst@kbin.social 30 points 6 months ago (8 children)

I know several large companies looking to Microsoft, Xen, and Proxmox. Though the smart ones are more interested in the open source solutions to avoid future rug-pulls.

[–] Kata1yst@kbin.social 29 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

2009 era was also when Intel leveraged their position in the compiler market to cripple all non-Intel processors. Nearly every benchmarking tool used that complier and put an enormous handicap on AMD processors by locking them to either no SSE or, later, back to SSE2.

My friends all thought I was crazy for buying AMD, but accusations had started circulating about the complier heavily favoring Intel at least as early as 2005, and they were finally ordered to stop in 2010 by the FTC... Though of course they have been caught cheating in several other ways since.

Everyone has this picture in their heads of AMD being the scrappy underdog and Intel being the professional choice, but Intel hasn't really worn the crown since the release of Athlon. Except during Bulldozer/Piledriver, but who can blame AMD for trying something crazy after 10 years of frustration?

[–] Kata1yst@kbin.social 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

That's called 'privilege escalation', and replacing system level calls with user level calls is closely watched for and guarded against with many different security measures including SELinux.

You've already outed yourself multiple times in this thread as someone who doesn't understand how security in the real world works. Take the L and try to learn from this. It's okay not to understand something. But it's very important to recognize when that happens and not claim to understand better than someone else.

[–] Kata1yst@kbin.social 4 points 6 months ago (3 children)

I strongly disagree with your premise. Separating authentication and privilege escalation adds layers of security that are non-trivial and greatly enhance resilience. Many attacks are detected and stopped at privilege escalation, because it happens locally before a user can stop or delete the flow of logs.

If I get into your non-privileged account I can set up a program that acts like sudo

No you cannot. A non privileged user doesn't have the access necessary to run a program that can accomplish this.

And even if they do it’s too late anyway because I’ve just compromised root and locked everybody out and I’m in there shitting on the filesystems or whatever. Because root can do anything.

Once again, you didn't privilege escalate, because once you have a foothold (authentication) you don't have the necessary privileges, so you must perform reconnaissance to identify an exploitable vector to privilage escalate with. This can be any number of things, but it's always noisy and slow, usually easy to detect in logs. There is a reason the most sophisticated attacks against well protected targets are "low and slow".

And if I can’t break into your non-privileged account then I can’t break into a privileged account either.

You're ignoring my points given regarding the risks of compromised keys. If there are no admin keys, there are no remote admin sessions.

These artificial distinctions between “non-privileged” and “superuser” accounts need to stop. This is not good security, this is not zero trust. Either you don’t trust anybody and enforce explicit privilege escalation for specific things, or just accept that you’re using a “super” paradigm and once you’ve got access to that user all bets are off.

Spoken like someone who has never red teamed or purple teamed. Even admin accounts are untrusted, given only privileges specific to their role, and closely monitored. That doesn't mean they should have valid security measures thrown away.

[–] Kata1yst@kbin.social 4 points 6 months ago (5 children)

Wouldn’t separate SSH keys achieve the same?

Separate ssh keys for the user and the admin? Yeah, see point 2, admins should not be remotely accessible.

Really? How, exactly? Break the ssh key authentication? And wouldn’t that apply to all accounts equally?

Keys aren't perfect security. They can easily be mishandled, sometimes getting published to GitHub, copied to USB drives which can easily be lost, etc.

Further, there have been attacks against SSH that let malicious actors connect remotely to any session, or take over existing sessions. By not allowing remote access on privileged accounts, you minimize risk.

Forcing a non privileged remote session to authenticate with a password establishes a second factor of security that is different from the first. This means a cracked password or a lost key is still not enough for a malicious actor to accomplish administrative privileges.

A key is something you have

A password is something you know

So, by not allowing remote privileged sessions, we're forcing a malicious actor to take one more non-trivial step before arriving at their goals. A step that will likely be fairly obvious in logs on a monitored machine.

[–] Kata1yst@kbin.social 7 points 6 months ago (7 children)

On a server, it allows you to track who initiates which root season session. It also greatly minimizes the attack surface from a security perspective to have admin privileged accounts unable to be remotely connected to.

[–] Kata1yst@kbin.social 1 points 6 months ago

I host my own to avoid running into timeouts, fairly easy

[–] Kata1yst@kbin.social 57 points 6 months ago (2 children)

MRSA infection following hospital admittance for Pneumonia. That shit is serious and way more prevalent than people think, it's just that it usually kills people who are already terminally ill.

Unlikely to be an assassination. But not impossible. Either way, looks very bad.

[–] Kata1yst@kbin.social 11 points 6 months ago

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/glass-lewis-recommends-investors-vote-against-three-boeing-directors-2024-04-30/

The recommendation to shareholders from the independent advisor who proxies Boeing is to vote out several board members who are responsible for safety and QA. Crazy to see at a Fortune 100.

[–] Kata1yst@kbin.social 20 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I use FreshRSS. Can't say I love the interface, but with the open and standardized API, there are dozens of beautiful front ends to choose on any device.

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