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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

Then you're fired because the server doesn't actually work.

If I were interviewing you, your answer would be considered nonsense and would cause you to not get hired in the first place. I actually need to write such a server for a product I'm working on. All it ever does is encrypted communications with other machines.

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OK, you're right. You'd only be fired in the other 99.9% of cases, where servers have to support standard protocols and normal users.

99.9% of cases, where servers have to support standard protocols and normal user.

True. True for all small and big companies' IT. But if you are a security or even just a forensics firm, then you ought to be in the other 0.1%

I have to wonder why you consider port knocking to be a useful security-usability tradeoff. If SSH alone isn't "secure" enough for you, then adding a port knock doesn't actually lift it over that boundary.

I just feel better that most of the time, other parties won't be able to even see the actual port.

OK, so then forget your "super secure" server. I would instead focus on compromising one of the admin computers that has the "special user" ssh key and the port knock sequence; or maybe I will hit one of the servers communicating with this "secure" computer and see if you remembered to bounds check all the data coming in; maybe even see if you network stack has any exploits in its tcp/udp implementations while I am at it...

OK, so then forget your "super secure" server. I would instead focus on compromising one of the admin computers that has the "special user" ssh key and the port knock sequence

Juicy! [making notes to buy a laptop for the express purpose of logging into the server]

maybe I will hit one of the servers communicating with this "secure" computer and see if you remembered to bounds check all the data coming in

All fields are fixed length.

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