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A kind of a tipping point for me was when one commenter called port-knocking ‘security through obscurity’. Sure, let's see attackers pick one of 65535^x combinations of ports, and meanwhile let's hear this smartass wax about how that's categorically different from a password.

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To be fair, any box in the middle can sniff that knock sequence, whereas a password can be transmitted securely.

I think in fact that the sequence can be changing, based on some secret and e.g. current time. Haven't had a chance to implement anything like that, though, and not sure if there's software that supports such an arrangement. It's true however that above some effort it's more of a meaningless flex, and the proper aim of hiding the ports from most attackers would be achieved long before fancy combinations.

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