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Comment by jamroom | Hacker News Reader

You can eliminate 99% of these attempted logins by changing your SSH port from the standard 22 to something else (say 2177 or whatever). Login as root (or su), open the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file and change the port number. Save your changes and restart ssh with "/etc/init.d/ssh restart" and you are good to go. You'll want to update any SSH clients you use to use the proper port (-p option on command line). Hope this helps!

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Even better is to additionally setup a fake SSHd at port 22, so that port scanners do not even bother keeping on looking for the port and instead use what they suspect to be working

I use https://code.google.com/p/kippo/ as a ssh honeypot, and https://github.com/mfontani/kippo-stats to display stats about it (number of attempts, successful logins, most usernames tried, most passwords tried for "root").

The data is quite interesting.

Here's a snapshot of where most "attacks" to my honeypot originate from (the more, the brighter): http://darkpan.com/files/latlong255.png

kippo's code is going to be less audited than openssh's. do you run kippo as root? is the risk of running kippo worth the stats?

kippo can't be executed as root.

How does it open a server on a port <1024 without privileged access?

You use iptables to route port 22 on the external interface to a high port on localhost

It probably doesn't.

  # accept traffic to the normal ssh port
  iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
  # accept traffic on the port kippo is listening on
  iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 2222 -j ACCEPT
  # direct traffic inbound on port 22 to port 2222
  iptables -A PREROUTING -t nat -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 22 -j REDIRECT --to-port 2222

Make sure also to add an ACCEPT rule for traffic to whatever port sshd is actually bound to.

That's fine so long as you trust all of the users on your system. Otherwise they could potentially get something running on port 22. Which, so long as you aren't actually sending auth info to 22, probably isn't a big deal.

http://www.faqs.org/docs/iptables/traversingoftables.html Table nat is traversed <b>before</b> filter table. Therefore, the rule iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT is unnecessary.

Everyone, hear the post above.

Damn little arrows and imprecise HTC touchscreens... downvoted you by mistake

I run it as a dedicated user, on a high port. Port 22 of the router is merely forwarded to the internal high port I use. Sure, I could chroot the thing as well.

As interesting and fun as honeypots are - unless it's your own gig, or the data from the honeypot fits into a larger security plan, it's just adding one more thing to manage. Move the port, run denyhosts, and in general just have access firewalled off to begin with.

Good grief I hope you never do this. Do NOT use a port > 1023 for anything that should run as root. If you do, and your machine gets compromised, any unprivileged user could start an ssh daemon, you might think, oh, why is the key different, accept it, and they've keylogged your login attempt.

I don't disagree in principle. In practice: how did they manage to start their own daemon on a port sshd is already bound to?

Web exploit, get a web shell, crash your ssh daemon somehow, start my own. Since it is running on a non-privileged port, easy enough to run my own ssh daemon there.

Crashing the ssh daemon isn't always easy, but, making the job easier for an attacker because 'obscurity' is considered a good protection scheme in this case opens up other potential vulnerabilities.

Linux' OOM killer, just to give one possible example.

This is only an issue if you're using password authentication and do not drop traffic on ports on which you are not running services.

Just use Single Packet Authorization, people.

It really depends on the scenario. Are you using one server? Do you manage a bunch of servers here and there for various clients? Are you responsible for corporate servers? All of them have different acceptable approaches to security.

On my on personal servers? Single-packet or port knocking or whatever, it's fun to play around - that's how you learn. At the enterprise? The internet can't ssh to anything - you need VPN access, and not just any but the correct VPN access, and the right credentials on audited machines. There's nothing for outsiders to knock on (except maybe the VPN - but that has auto-lockout and password rotation tied into the enterprise auth system)

If someone wanted to do port knocking or similar for enterprise stuff I think that'd be a staunch "Umm, no"

Thanks for this - this is good advice. Using a port over 1023 doesn't make sense and isn't necessary - the idea is to just change the port from the normal 22. Thanks!

This won't give you much security (most of entropy is in your password/keyfile), but will highly lower the convenience, because you'd have to use `-p 2177` or put the port number in `$HOME/.ssh/config`.

Same goes to port-knocking.

Just throw in denyhosts/fail2ban, and follow simple rules (no root login, no password/keyboard-interactive logins, possibly, except for special emergency "oh-shit-i've-lost-my-keyfile" account with secure passphrase and non-dictionary username), and you'll be perfectly safe.

You are right about the entropy in one sense. So against a determined attacker the port does not matter.

On the other hand, most drive-by attackers won't bother going for the other ports. Perhaps you can make some argument involving the probability/entropy/information of the attacks vs your defenses.

Make sure to open the relevant port on your firewall before you do this!!

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