forwarding port 22 safe? - eviltoast

i want to remotely ssh to my home server, and I was wondering if I could just forward port 22 with disabling password login and use pubkey authentication will be safe enough?

  • pentesticals@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    Just waiting for everyone to come in saying you shouldn’t do this lol. Yes, changing the port is a nice little bonus. It doesn’t any extra security, but it moves you out of the way from the automated bots that scan the internet trying recent 0days. You’ll probably see a reduction of 99% traffic hitting the service and the only logs will be real people.

    • Oujii@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      only logs will be real people.

      There are bots that scan for open ports in minutes.

      • pentesticals@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        Yes but most bots are scanning for common ports. It’s far too slow to scan 65k ports on every host. Even things like shodan only scan a handful of common ports. But you can test this yourself, expose SSH on a port number in 20-40ks, I’ve seen several weeks without a single probe.

        If you’ve ever done mass scanning you know that’s minutes is not going to to be a full scan and if you are trying to do 65k ports in a few minutes, your results will not be accurate.

        • dal8moc@alien.topB
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          1 year ago

          Which is easily defeated by using one block of ip addresses to gather data and another block for actually trying to exploit found ports. Unless you block the whole AS. If the attacker only uses one system with one ip they probably wouldn’t have the resources to get past ssh anyway.

          • Karyo_Ten@alien.topB
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            1 year ago

            Behavior blocking can be done across many IPs.

            If you have one IP that scans port 10000, the other port 10001, and thousands of other IPs scanning just 1 port it’s still blatantly obvious.

            And if they want to scan in a less obvious manner they need to do this spaced by days.