On Apr 10, 2017, at 2:17 PM, Jim Garrison <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> On 4/10/2017 8:22 AM, Paul Heinlein wrote:
>> I've got a CentOS 7 VM running off in the cloud. It exposes SSH on 
>> port 22 to the world. I've thought about moving it to an alternate 
>> port, and may someday do so, but in the meantime I've tried to keep up 
>> with best practices for sshd configuration.
>> 
>> I recently changed the KexAlgorithms setting, removing all 
>> key-exchange algorithms based on NIST curves. (Google variants of 
>> "ed25519 nist ssh ecdh" for my reasoning.) Anyway, the new setting:
>> 
>> KexAlgorithms 
>> [email protected],diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha256
>> 
>> All of my machines (MacOS 10.12, CentOS 6, CentOS 7) can work with 
>> this setting, so I don't have to worry about infinite backward 
>> compatibility.
>> 
>> One interesting and unintended result of this change is that many SSH 
>> scanners will fail while trying to negotiate a key exchange. The log 
>> entries are short and sweet:
>> 
>> sshd[18200]: fatal: Unable to negotiate a key exchange method [preauth]
>> 
>> The number of scanners that even get through to the stage of 'Invalid 
>> user' has dropped from a couple hundred per day to less than a dozen.
>> 
>> Everyone's situation is different, of course, and this alteration may 
>> not work in your environment -- but you may find it worthwhile raising 
>> the bar on the KexAlgorithm, Ciphers, and MACs in your sshd_config, 
>> especially if your SSH daemon is exposed to the world at large.
>> 
> 
> I've been running sshd on a non-standard port above 5000 for about 7
> years, on various hosting services, both real hardware and more recently
> virtual machines.  I think in 7 years I've seen only **two** attempted
> connections and I think those were from someone just doing a portscan,
> as the log messages were one-offs and not repeated.
> 
> There has never been any effort from anybody to actually connect.
> 
Any thoughts on the consequences of arbitrary users being able to run their own 
sshd on port numbers >1024? Would that mean that if somebody got access to your 
machine, they could replace the listening sshd with their own?

--
Louis Kowolowski                                [email protected]
Cryptomonkeys:                                   http://www.cryptomonkeys.com/ 
<http://www.cryptomonkeys.com/>



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