At Teleport, we advocate SSH certificates over SSH keys and passwords as the best authentication method for SSH. Nothing beats the security and operational flexibility of using certificate-based authentication for a large fleet of SSH servers running on dynamic infrastructure. But in practice, certificate-based authentication is far from the de facto authentication method, and sometimes we may need to use SSH keys.
This article will explore methods for “hiding” SSH servers so that the server is harder to discover by malicious users on public networks. We’ll focus on changing the default SSH port and implementing SSH port knocking to make it more difficult for unwanted users to discover or locate the server.
Privileged Access Management (PAM) is a go-to solution to prevent privilege misuse and insider threats, and limit malware propagation. After all, properly protecting and monitoring the keys to the kingdom is always a good practice. Privileged Access Management has been even more critical in recent times. With the advent of the cloud where infrastructure is provisioned with a single API call and authenticated with a single API key, the risk of someone misusing these credentials is far higher.
How Dylan Statmat of https://www.verticalchange.com/ uses Teleport to obtain HIPAA compliance.
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a keystone to accessing AWS accounts, but as companies grow, it can be difficult to understand and standardize, especially across many AWS accounts. To put some personality into the challenges of managing identity for multiple AWS resources and accounts, I’ll start with a short story about a fictional company that you might recognize as similar to the one you work in today! ACME Net is growing fast.
