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If you have just/as of late gotten an email about your keys being revoked, this is because of me, and if you have, you should really go through and make sure that no one has done anything terrible to you, since you have opened yourself to people doing very mean things to you for what is most likely a very long time.
Almost every year a joke RFC is made on April 1st (these have caught on so well, that it’s now common to see more than one of these every year), or April Fool’s Day, and some of them are pretty great. Here are some of my favourites:
It’s an established fact on the internet that we have ran out of IP(v4) addresses , and we are starting to see the pressure on obtaining IPv4 space. For example if you want to get a /24 block from RIPE NCC when you sign up as a member, then you are currently looking at a 2 month wait for a recycled IPv4 /24 block .
Border Gateway Protocol is the de facto protocol that directs routing decisions between different ISP networks, and is generally known as the “glue” that holds the internet together. It’s safe to say that the internet we currently know would not function without working BGP implementations.
It has become clear that storing secrets in computers is hard. The best demo to the world that storing secrets on “online” computers is hard and sometimes devastating, is the large amounts of cryptocurrency theft due to critical keys being in memory of systems directly or indirectly connected to the internet.
Personal websites are weird. We are mostly past the era of having them, as things like twitter and hosted blog services like Medium have taken them over, but I’m a hold out. I run both my own blog, and have a landing page on the apex domain since the server that hosts the blog (Google App Engine + Cloudflare) is…
Backups are critical. If you are lucky and organised you have a set of useful backup primitives, such as Point in Time snapshots on your Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS), your disk array controller, or volume manager. However there always seems to be some critical machine in my life that does not fall into these…
Some people change their SSH port on their servers so that it is slightly harder to find for bots or other nasties and while that is generally viewed as an action of security through obscurity it does work very well at killing a lot of the automated logins you always see in /var/log/auth.log .
Much like a previous talk of mine at Chaos Computer Congress this blog post is a direct write-up of a talk, if you prefer to consume this kind of content in video form you can watch the video here:
SSH is everywhere in the development or operations world now. For development it’s what allows you to push to GitHub. For operations it’s what allows you to reasonably securely log into Linux servers.
This post is a textual version of a talk I gave at The 35th Chaos Computer Congress at the end of 2018. You can watch the talk that was recorded by the wonderful C3VOC team below if that’s your preferred medium: