[HN Gopher] Tor is a great sysadmin tool (2020)
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Tor is a great sysadmin tool (2020)
        
       Author : azalemeth
       Score  : 268 points
       Date   : 2021-08-31 17:07 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.jamieweb.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.jamieweb.net)
        
       | swiley wrote:
       | I loved TOR when I was a broke student without enough money to
       | have one or two always on machines with public IPs I could
       | reverse proxy to.
        
       | rinron wrote:
       | One very important thing not mentioned is that the tor exit node
       | could be capturing your traffic or do a MITM attack. Its a great
       | idea for testing but only after you have encryption working, and
       | of course pay special attention to your ssh fingerprints.
        
         | fswwi wrote:
         | Cloudflare is mitm, btw.
        
         | boring_twenties wrote:
         | Hidden services are not accessed through exit nodes. Relay
         | nodes cannot capture your traffic or perform MITM attacks.
        
         | segfaultbuserr wrote:
         | If the endpoint is in your control and you'd like to experiment
         | with Tor, you can configure your server as an Onion Service, so
         | you are protected by Tor's own end-to-end encryption (whose
         | traffic cannot be captured by MITM since the hostnames
         | themselves are the public keys). For non-anonymous uses, you
         | should active the "Single Service Onion" mode, so the 6-hop
         | (extra 3-hop for server anonymity) is skipped, allowing
         | standard 3-hop latency and performance. It also saves bandwidth
         | for exit nodes - all non-exit relays can forward Onion traffic.
        
       | slacka wrote:
       | Tor is also useful is to verify country specific customization on
       | your website are working. I regularly used Tor on reports of
       | issues with default language or currency. It's just a quick
       | toggle of a setting in "torrc" to limit your exit node to a
       | specific country code.
        
       | lambdaba wrote:
       | ngrok.com allows some of these, at full (or at least, much better
       | speed, haven't benchmarked), and is mostly free (paid plan
       | required for custom subdomains). Sharing this for those still
       | unaware of it, it's a great service.
        
         | anaganisk wrote:
         | Or better yet, use cloudflare tunnels and setup an actual
         | permanent tunnel with custom subdomain support. If you want it
         | to be a temporary one, it supports that too. For FREE.
        
           | Shank wrote:
           | Is that part of Cloudflare Teams? No offense to Cloudflare,
           | but their pricing is really unclear. I have an account and I
           | use them for a lot, but they have 3 different "plans" and
           | then they have various ad-hoc products. Tunnel just says
           | "view in dashboard." [0] If I click on that link while logged
           | in, I'm taken to my dashboard with no indication of how to
           | use Tunnel or anything. The plans page [1] indicates that
           | it's part of argo smart routing. If I click on "activate
           | argo" it actually does the exact same thing as the teams
           | "view in dashboard" button -- it redirects me to the
           | dashboard and has no indication of being activated or
           | anything. Really frustrating.
           | 
           | [0]: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/tunnel/
           | 
           | [1]: https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/
        
             | PaywallBuster wrote:
             | It's confusing for me too
             | 
             | product page says it requires paid Argo (smart routing)
             | subscription https://www.cloudflare.com/en-
             | gb/products/tunnel/
             | 
             | the blog page says its free
             | https://blog.cloudflare.com/tunnel-for-everyone/
             | 
             | and actually you can install and run it quite easily
             | brew uninstall cloudflare/cloudflare/cloudflared
             | cloudflared login        cloudflared tunnel
             | 
             | this will launch a tunnel with a random subdomain listening
             | to http://localhost:8080
        
               | pigeonhole123 wrote:
               | It became free recently, so they've probably just
               | forgotten to update their documentation which seems to be
               | a pattern with CF.
        
       | RIMR wrote:
       | I used to have Nessus installed on a NUC that I would just drop
       | into a customer's network closet for a weekend, and monitor
       | remotely.
       | 
       | I hosted the Nessus UI as a Tor Hidden Service, and it worked
       | great. We just cycled the key every quarter for added security,
       | and so that ex-employees wouldn't know where to find it.
        
       | unsignedint wrote:
       | Back when I was managing system in a small company, I had a
       | couple of systems on hidden service with auth cookies. When port
       | forward failed or otherwise had problem accessing, it provided
       | decent plan B for getting things back online.
        
       | skadamat wrote:
       | Smells a bit like Wireguard use case!
        
         | RIMR wrote:
         | Wireguard is a great technology, and if latency and file
         | transfers are important you should use it, but a Tor hidden
         | service is way easier to set up, and way more reliable.
        
       | azalemeth wrote:
       | In many ways I think this blog post really makes quite compelling
       | arguments and honestly opened my eyes a bit.
       | 
       | One (perhaps mad) idea for more secure access to a machine deep
       | behind many levels of NAT where you, the sysadmin, have lawful
       | access but are fed up with having to have a 12 KB ~/.ssh/config
       | file in order to access it because of your university's
       | overbearing IT department^W^W^W^W network topology, would be to
       | "just" run an onionsite with onion services authentication [1],
       | preventing it being publicly accessed without the pre-shared key.
       | If your onion service just redirects to ssh (presumably with
       | certificate-only auth) I can't help but think that this is
       | _almost_ an example of security by obscurity done right.
       | 
       | [1] https://support.torproject.org/en-US/onionservices/client-
       | au...
        
         | KingMachiavelli wrote:
         | For that use case why not just use Wireguard?
        
           | [deleted]
        
             | alisonkisk wrote:
             | Wireguard is not the same as ZeroTier.
        
         | nine_k wrote:
         | If your hard-to-reach server can connect to the internet (via a
         | bunch of NATs and whatnot), you can just make it access your
         | box of choice by e.g. Wireguard, or plain SSH with port-
         | forwaring, or attach it as a node to your ZeroTier private
         | network.
         | 
         | You only need a bunch of jump hosts if your target server has
         | no Internet connectivity, and should not, in which case all
         | these levels of bastions do make sense.
        
           | azalemeth wrote:
           | That requires having another publicly accessible box, or
           | trusting ZeroTier though, doesn't it? The onion approach does
           | not.
        
             | lacrosse_tannin wrote:
             | you _could_ use your other device (the one you're
             | connecting from) as the controller. whomst amongst us
             | doesn't have a 3rd machine or VPS?
        
               | a1369209993 wrote:
               | Your other device doesn't have a public IP address
               | either.
        
             | novok wrote:
             | ZeroTier, Tailscale and such are OSS and have been
             | independently security & crypto audited. I don't know if
             | tailscale has been audited, but since they are a more
             | popular tool I bet they probably are too. They're actually
             | really good tools and would probably be more reliable than
             | tor tbh, I would recommend looking into them.
        
               | Nullabillity wrote:
               | > ZeroTier, Tailscale and such are OSS and have been
               | independently security & crypto audited.
               | 
               | Both rely on their centralized coordinator servers which
               | can mess with your routes (and thus your traffic) however
               | they please.
               | 
               | ZeroTier has a published (but not OSS) coordinator, but
               | their documentation pushes you towards their SaaS.
               | Tailscale's coordinator is SaaS-only, unless something
               | has changed very recently.
        
               | lacrosse_tannin wrote:
               | zerotier adhoc networks are controllerless, though ipv6
               | only.
               | 
               | The client can be set to not allow routes/addresses from
               | a controller.
               | 
               | The client and controller are licensed BSL.
        
               | nine_k wrote:
               | Does this require addresses of nodes to be globally
               | routable? (With such addresses you can as well connect
               | directly.)
        
               | nine_k wrote:
               | This is fair.
               | 
               | Their client node software is audited though, and the
               | contents of your packets are not accessible to the
               | router. This is why the amount of the possible meddling
               | is limited to a DoS, AFAICT.
               | 
               | Who audits the Tor nodes that do onion routing is
               | anyone's guess; I suppose ZeroTier is no worse than them.
        
         | krtyiktj wrote:
         | at our lab the tor traffic would be noticed by the cyber
         | security group's ids and all traffic from your host would start
         | dropping at the border so fast your head would spin. you'd get
         | an unpleasant phone call or visit to your office and be warned
         | never to try side stepping the bastion ssh hosts that log all
         | the things ever again.
        
           | derefr wrote:
           | Obviously, you should plan around this by gathering all the
           | MAC addresses of every machine in the office, and then have
           | your machine spoof through them in rotation. /s
        
             | sillysaurusx wrote:
             | It makes me sad every time I think about it, but Aaron
             | Swartz did this during his saga. Well, sort of: he
             | incremented the MAC address by 1.
             | 
             | Point being, it's not foolproof. If some clever undergrad
             | is thinking about dodging the suits, win by fooling them,
             | not by fighting them.
             | 
             | If you do insist on fighting, though, start at
             | https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Mental_Model and then read the
             | entire Whonix wiki
             | https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Documentation. It's what I used
             | when I was serious about dodging the cartels, and that
             | knowledge will protect you as much as anything will.
             | 
             | (You'll hopefully conclude that the protection is too
             | brittle to risk your life, as I did.)
        
               | nqzero wrote:
               | building a new computer. want to be able to trust it 100%
               | for at least a moment. i can't figure out how to "buy" a
               | trusted copy of any linux and don't have any machines i
               | have 100% trust in (who does), so can't burn it. current
               | plan is to buy a chromebook solely for the purpose of
               | downloading and burning ubuntu. alternatively, buy
               | MSWindows, install on the new machine, burn, and then
               | replace
               | 
               | but this mental exercise has convinced me that security
               | is almost impossible in this day and age
        
               | sillysaurusx wrote:
               | One thing that helps a lot in this situation is to plan
               | based on threat model. There's no such thing as 100%
               | trust, but you can have a computer which is safe for e.g.
               | <thing>. It's pretty crucial to pick one or two specific
               | <thing>s and focus only on those.
               | 
               | If you just want to browse the darknet and see what the
               | markets are like, for example, Tor on your current
               | computers is fine.
               | 
               | If you're wanting to make a purchase and you're worried
               | that your existing computers will narc on you, your plan
               | of buy laptop + use ubuntu is A+.
               | 
               | If you want a computer to store information on, Edward
               | Snowden style, you'll need to take increasingly serious
               | steps. Use tails as a baseline. (Note: I've been out of
               | the game since 2016, so take this with salt.)
               | 
               | If you're literally dodging the NSA, you need to put on a
               | full face mask in winter, plan a route to a store you've
               | recon'd, buy clothes with cash from goodwill, carry them
               | in a trash bag as you walk out of your neighborhood,
               | sneak in between two houses in the dead of night and put
               | the outfit on + mask, walk to a taxi, have it take you
               | near (but not to) the electronics store, buy yourself a
               | burner phone + a few USB wifi dongles + anything else you
               | want completely unlinkable to you (you're on cameras),
               | pay for all of it while getting some strange and worried
               | looks that you're going to rob something, then do the
               | entire process in reverse until you're back at your house
               | with your untraceable electronics.
               | 
               | I did all that, and even then I was likely making some
               | small mistake that would've blown everything.
               | 
               | Yet the city wide surveillance drones (god eye) will
               | still have a nice little record of you that they can ID
               | you with. And you sneaking around in the middle of the
               | night putting on masks will probably get you in serious
               | trouble. It never really occurs to you when you're doing
               | this sort of thing to stop and consider whether you're
               | just doing crazy things. (It's tempting to believe the
               | answer is "no," especially the more you want to believe
               | it.)
               | 
               | Suffice to say, threat modeling is key, and it's worth
               | thinking carefully about what exactly you want to
               | accomplish.
        
               | derefr wrote:
               | > If you're literally dodging the NSA, you need to...
               | 
               | Or just make friends with an developing-world advance-fee
               | scammer, and then pay them to have one of their cash
               | mules buy and send you (that is, an empty house somewhere
               | in your city) a laptop.
        
               | alkz wrote:
               | most distributions provide signatures/checksums to verify
               | the download eg. https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/how-to-
               | verify-ubuntu#1-overview
        
           | rattlesnakedave wrote:
           | > you'd get an unpleasant phone call or visit to your office
           | and be warned
           | 
           | sometimes I wonder why IT departments and security in general
           | get a bad wrap, then I see things like this.
        
             | relax88 wrote:
             | When someone just does whatever they feel like and violates
             | policy, what do you think should happen?
             | 
             | Should someone send them a sternly worded email for them to
             | ignore?
             | 
             | Or maybe they should be allowed to do whatever they want
             | regardless of what risk it poses to the organization?
        
           | relax88 wrote:
           | I can confirm as someone who works in netsec that this
           | exactly how it would have gone at my previous employer.
           | 
           | There is a tone of "I know what's best and will do what I
           | want" in this thread.
           | 
           | If you think that the way to get the IT department to
           | implement something for you is to sidestep around policy
           | instead of working with them, you will just piss them off.
        
           | marcodiego wrote:
           | Is tor traffic that easy to detect?
        
             | blendergeek wrote:
             | Yes. It goes to a known tor node.
        
               | rnhmjoj wrote:
               | Not necessarily true. Tor bridges exist precisely for
               | this reason: https://tb-manual.torproject.org/bridges/
        
             | Forbo wrote:
             | Relay and exit node IPs aren't private, so admins will
             | often collect them and just block them en masse. This
             | causes problems, because a lot of that same IP space will
             | often be shared with things like pool.ntp.org nodes.
        
           | azalemeth wrote:
           | The meek pluggable transport together with Azure's domain
           | fronting service explicitly makes it look like it's
           | connecting to an Azure instance over https. [1]
           | 
           | [1]
           | https://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/trac/-/wikis/doc/meek
        
         | kodablah wrote:
         | Yup, and it's easy to make server and client side tooling use
         | Tor to make this mostly transparent. Latency/bandwidth isn't
         | _that_ bad when communicating with an onion service. And it can
         | be even faster if server anonymity isn't a goal (server set
         | HiddenServiceSingleHopMode and HiddenServiceNonAnonymousMode
         | and create ephemerial onion service with NonAnonymous).
         | 
         | I use Tor plenty to self-host services from my house that are
         | reachable anywhere (and often have a web interface I can access
         | via Orbot). No hole-punching necessary.
        
           | njsubedi wrote:
           | Could you share more about your setup?
        
             | kodablah wrote:
             | Sure. I wrote https://github.com/cretz/bine (though I
             | admittedly don't work on it much these days). I just have a
             | few-line daemon that starts an HTTP (or gRPC or whatever)
             | server on ephemeral onion service. Then I use that onion ID
             | to access it (via TorBrowser or Orbot or a client built
             | with the same library).
        
         | croutonwagon wrote:
         | Agree. Thats pretty interesting.
         | 
         | I use an SSH session and SOCKS5 proxy on a VPS provider for
         | almost all of those other circumstances. Including checking
         | external access etc.
         | 
         | But the last one is a solid use case.
        
         | fluential wrote:
         | You will like this one as well "SSL/SSH Multiplexer"
         | http://www.rutschle.net/tech/sslh/
        
         | ISL wrote:
         | Think from the beginning what will be the end: "I thought your
         | security policy was too overbearing, so I used tor."
         | 
         | IT departments make their choices for reasons. The key is to
         | help them understand your use-case, and they'll probably help
         | you through the problem in a way that might limit collateral
         | damage.
         | 
         | Source: have seen firewall bypasses (with a pre-shared key) get
         | leveraged as a way to hack an entire university lab/department.
        
           | azalemeth wrote:
           | I tried doing that, and largely succeeded, but the specific
           | area of the university in question will _not_ have a bastion
           | SSH host _anywhere_ on _their_ network. They will not allow
           | SSH access in _at all_. They _will_ however allow SSH access
           | to other parts of the university, with different people in
           | charge, which explicitly _do_ allow an SSH bastion host to
           | exist (and provide several for that purpose). So, the net
           | result is that they 've effectively out-sourced the control
           | and responsibility of their environment to someone else.
           | 
           | Normally this is fine, but my job involves programming and
           | controlling large, expensive, and strangely fragile lab
           | equipment. There's a resilience problem, and it's got to the
           | point where others have suggested putting a GSM modem on a
           | pci-e card inside some of the boxes in question, as the
           | relevant IT department decides on a whim to block ports with
           | no warning or justification. Some manufacturers of the
           | devices in question do this as standard if you have a support
           | contract. Trying to complain results in responses like "you
           | have been used to doing things one way and this change now
           | prevents you from working as before."
           | 
           | I completely accept that this is a political problem and best
           | solved as one, but ultimately SSH is an industry standard for
           | a reason -- it's secure, and it's flexible. The machines in
           | question are valuable, prone to breaking in the middle of the
           | night, and we are an international bunch who cannot always
           | connect from a well-defined ipv4 address, or from the
           | university's VPN. (The latter is blocked by the IT department
           | automatically, as it has too large a pool of potential
           | users). The thing I find most frustrating is that this sort
           | of political decision creates days worth of work
           | instantaneously, for little benefit. All of the actually
           | confidential or sensitive information is held in a completely
           | separate network at any rate...
        
             | unethical_ban wrote:
             | To quote Dr. Manhattan, "Without condemning, or condoning,
             | I understand".
             | 
             | I am in network security. I have stopped shadow IT, and
             | been a part of it.
             | 
             | Your situation seems so ungodly stupid and anathema to the
             | point of IT, that the remaining courses of action _should_
             | be the following.
             | 
             | Thoroughly document via email your attempts at explaining
             | requirements to Netsec, to document in writing their
             | objections, to do your best with what they provide you...
             | and WHEN things catastrophically break, point the finger at
             | them and thoroughly document how if you had the proper,
             | industry-standard tooling, you could have prevented the
             | loss of research/time/money.
        
               | zaphar wrote:
               | THIS. Don't paper over the issues with shadow IT. Make
               | them painfully obvious to the point where IT has to do
               | something or answer to it. Otherwise it will not change.
               | 
               | I've given teams the option to turn off their pagers when
               | this sort of thing happens with the justification that
               | they can't fix it anyway. And then documented the crap
               | out of why they can't fix it so when someone asks I can
               | point to existing policy. It's very effective if done
               | right.
        
           | nephanth wrote:
           | Especially when, since it's Tor, potential attackers cannot
           | be traced
        
           | ryneandal wrote:
           | > IT departments make their choices for reasons.
           | 
           | In a perfect world, yes. But I've worked with/at places where
           | ineptitude is rampant, and any attempts of understanding
           | their reasoning is seen as insubordination.
        
           | novok wrote:
           | IT departments make choices that benefit their own needs and
           | for their own convience, often forgetting that the entire
           | point of their department is to make the rest of the
           | organization more effective. Sadly, it often goes the other
           | way.
           | 
           | Shadow IT is a signal that the IT organization is doing
           | things wrong. People use shadow IT because the IT department
           | is not doing it's job properly, serving it's customer base
           | based on the needs they show via their actions.
           | 
           | For example, if you see someone like azalemeth do the things
           | he does, it shows that the IT department needs to become
           | responsive enough and cooperative enough to not push him to
           | do such things in the first place. You notice he's tried to
           | do thing the IT department standard way first, and spent
           | considerable effort before he started his shadow IT method.
        
             | relax88 wrote:
             | "Policy made my job slightly harder so because I know
             | better than the netsec team who clearly has or should have
             | unlimited time and resources to help me I will do what I
             | want anyways, and put the organization at risk."
             | 
             | Also known as "how to make the netsec team hate you 101"
             | 
             | I agree with you about why shadow IT exists, but most IT
             | departments are spread so thin that expecting them to be
             | super responsive to anything but the most critical business
             | projects is often totally unreasonable.
             | 
             | Then they have to waste even more time hunting down idiots
             | setting up Tor nodes on their internal networks.
        
               | still_grokking wrote:
               | If the IT department can't do its job because of resource
               | constraints likely the whole organization is a failure.
               | 
               | If you find something like that, run...
               | 
               | If you can't run, do whatever makes your live better. The
               | org is doomed anyway.
        
               | azalemeth wrote:
               | A recent example from me -- one VPN suddenly refused to
               | connect one day for no discernible reason when they made
               | a configuration change to their cisco vpn "concentrator"
               | without publishing it fully. Cisco AnyConnect GUI clients
               | were fine and some magic happened behind the scenes to
               | push the configuration change and, in typical Cisco
               | style, avoid saying what exactly it was.
               | 
               | I had some esoteric monitoring machine that couldn't run
               | anyconnect (for reasons I forget but almost certainly
               | relating to it not having a linux arm64 client at that
               | time) and naturally couldn't connect randomly one day
               | with openconnect (which previously had worked perfectly).
               | I asked what the configuration change was to prevent me
               | having to reverse-engineer it. The response was "if you
               | want to use unsupported clients we cannot offer any
               | assistance [...] we are currently operating two heads
               | down and we simply do not have the resources [...]."
               | 
               | I totally understand it from the other side. IT
               | departments have everything from state-sponsored
               | ransomware attacks to important people loudly going "why
               | doesn't the printer work any more". It's a different set
               | of skills to being a C-junkie, a programming wizard, or,
               | in my case, a young academic with one big grant and three
               | PhD students trying to both do work, publish work, and
               | get money to do more work where "work" is poorly defined
               | and highly flexible. Over time I've noticed universities
               | get far more corporate and many academics _absolutely
               | hate this_ , of which I am one. The "we control the
               | network, bug off" may be technically true but at times it
               | _does_ feel a bit like an imposition of some sort of
               | academic freedom, to be honest. At the very least, it 's
               | a nice little "dog egg" to find added to the pile of
               | administrative crap to do for that day.
        
               | Aloha wrote:
               | I'm working in an organization where we have one laptop
               | from work, and another laptop to do work on. Because the
               | one sized fits all IT policy doesn't work for our org,
               | but it's forced on us because of the IP security needs of
               | another parallel org.
               | 
               | We went from an organization moving towards BYOD, to, now
               | the exact opposite.
        
           | pope_meat wrote:
           | A simulated conversation with IT:
           | 
           | "Hey, IT department...I was wondering..."
           | 
           | "No."
        
             | eitland wrote:
             | Lucky me.
             | 
             | Our IT department goes out the of their way to help us stay
             | sane and productive
             | 
             | - they're making sure most of us can continue to use our
             | favourite Linux distro (I think most Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora
             | and Arch is supported)
             | 
             | - make sure VPN etc works on Linux even if it is not
             | officially supported
             | 
             | - taking time to sit down and debug hard problems (weird
             | issues with WSL2 on one particular Windows laptop) instead
             | of just blaming us engineers
        
       | api wrote:
       | Not sure why you'd use this instead of something like ZeroTier or
       | a bounce box, but I can think of one reason: you want to hide the
       | location of something in your infrastructure to make side channel
       | attacks on the cloud provider or physical location a lot harder.
        
         | alisonkisk wrote:
         | Part of the point is to generate non-criminal usage of Tor to
         | legitimize it.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | lifeisstillgood wrote:
       | Being a small cog, but using clever tricks to get your job done
       | is not solving the problem.
       | 
       | An organisation that prevents itself from acting rationally is an
       | organisation that should die Schumpter-style. Please don't
       | prevent it.
        
         | croutonwagon wrote:
         | I use similar "clever tricks", albeit with SSH and socks to do
         | the same type of testing.
         | 
         | DNS can be funky, its useful to test resolution externally and
         | internally.
         | 
         | Traffic can be funky when routed, its useful to t-shoot sites
         | through a proxy here and there as there have been times it
         | works internally and is broken externally (often security
         | appliances are inline that may need debugging).
         | 
         | Working in IT infra/ops means its our jobs to use some of these
         | tools to troubleshoot these methods.
        
         | throwaway09223 wrote:
         | I'm not seeing where this relates to organizational
         | dysfunction. Using an external point to test a system is a
         | standard practice.
         | 
         | I'm also a little confused because preventing someone from
         | using their abilities to problem solve would be a _cause_ of
         | dysfunction -- a seemingly avoidable one.
        
         | sumtechguy wrote:
         | Also circumventing this sort of thing in many orgs is a first
         | class ticket to finding a new job. Friend of mine did that,
         | they walked him to the curb with his cardboard box that day.
         | His sin? Turned off virus scanning because it was taking 4
         | hours to do a 20 min build.
        
           | novok wrote:
           | The organization did him a favor. Many other, far more well
           | paying companies response to doing that is working with the
           | developer to figure out a system to make them both happy, or
           | just silently ignoring it until they figure out a better
           | solution. Or just talking to the person and asking them to
           | stop, vs firing.
        
           | azalemeth wrote:
           | To be honest, if I were in that situation I'd be thinking
           | something along the lines of "well, that was a dodged
           | bullet".
        
       | asddubs wrote:
       | I like using tor when testing DNS resolution related stuff, to
       | circumvent some part of my system having a cached entry already.
        
       | trey-jones wrote:
       | Several years ago I used a Tor Hidden Service in a professional
       | capacity to expose an application from a Wireless network with
       | properties that we wouldn't know ahead of time.
       | 
       | Worked like a charm, and no regrets. My favorite part was telling
       | my employer "We're using TOR for this" _eyebrows_.
        
       | menduza23 wrote:
       | Tor is a great tool for freedom. People tend to bash it and say
       | people use it for child porn. But the reality with freedom and
       | free choice is that you can also use that freedom to do bad. We
       | are seeing censorship in the west on the same scale as china
       | right now. I won't be surprised if Tor gets taken out of action
       | in the west soon.
        
       | tempfs wrote:
       | Using Tor for anything in a corporate network will rightfully get
       | you into serious shit with IT security.
       | 
       | I see a lot of people also advocating ngrok, wireguard, etc. You
       | all may not realize that actual threat actors use all of these
       | same techniques and making yourself look like them could very
       | well lead to your termination as this kind of circumvention of
       | security controls is absolutely a threat to the org and a
       | violation of security policy.
       | 
       | TLDR; If you need remote access, use the proper
       | channels....pretty please. For everyone's sake.
        
         | sockpuppet_12 wrote:
         | This is the correct answer, and also the hardest answer because
         | it's going to require you to have to swallow your pride.
         | 
         | Security will already be monitoring your traffic as a basic
         | first step, which they will pipe straight into a SIEM or SOAR
         | system. Doing this stuff will likely get you flagged for an
         | audit.
        
       | eximius wrote:
       | So the big message is proxies are useful? I mean, sure. I'm not
       | sure why Tor makes a better choice than anything else?
        
       | jstrieb wrote:
       | I can confirm that Tor is very useful for exposing services when
       | you cannot port forward!
       | 
       | Specifically, I've used Tor for connecting to GitHub Actions
       | virtual machines over SSH. This is great for debugging Actions
       | without running them over and over again. I also used this for a
       | project that sets up an ephemeral, collaborative environment in
       | one of the GitHub Actions VMs.
       | 
       | https://github.com/jstrieb/ctf-collab
        
       | segfaultbuserr wrote:
       | The article didn't mention another nice trick: Tor is also a
       | great tool for accessing IPv4 sites in a IPv6-only network and
       | vice versa.
        
       | suyash wrote:
       | For some reason IT dept hates as I get notification when I try to
       | use it. I think coz it jumps over so many IP addresses.
        
       | dijit wrote:
       | I actually use tailscale for exactly this reason.
       | 
       | NAT is the devil.
       | 
       | The latency of tor might be a bit too much though.
        
       | INTPenis wrote:
       | I recently had to do some basic sysadmin stuff over tor and I
       | disagree with OP.
       | 
       | Two things that failed mieserably, fetching a file that was just
       | shy of 5M, and a reverse SSH tunnel.
       | 
       | The SSH tunnel was unusable, it would only last for minutes at
       | the most. I wish I could use mosh but that requires UDP.
       | 
       | The file transfer was actually done with curl and the file was
       | often incomplete.
       | 
       | This was all done within Europe where we have the highest
       | concentration of tor nodes.
       | 
       | So no, I don't think tor is appropriate for sysadmin tasks.
        
         | aarchi wrote:
         | > This was all done within Europe where we have the highest
         | concentration of tor nodes.
         | 
         | So Tor nodes take locality into account? Although, that would
         | improve speeds, it seems like an information leak.
        
           | INTPenis wrote:
           | Not sure, just an educated guess but peering is best in that
           | region so there is a large selection of nodes with very good
           | peering. No need to use a node outside of europe.
        
       | 5faulker wrote:
       | Interesting use of a security tool
        
       | posterboy wrote:
       | why did I read sadism instead of sysadmin?
        
       | jedberg wrote:
       | Heh, most of these use cases I solved by having a personal
       | jumphost in a cabinet in a datacenter. But this is very clever! I
       | like the idea of using Tor because you'll get much better tests.
        
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       (page generated 2021-08-31 23:00 UTC)