I only can assume: 1.5 months rounded up, using 31 days a month 31+16=47

So you get half a month to realize that your monthly automated renewal is broken?

There are many ways to harden against it, but “just disable root auth” is not really it, since it in itself does not add much.

No you can alias that command and hijack the password promt via bashrc and then you have the root password as soon as the user enters it.

With aliases in the bashrc you can hijack any command and execute instead of the command any arbitrary commands. So the command can be extracted, as already stated above, this is not a weakness of sudo but a general one.

And how would you not be able to hijack the password when you have control over the user session?

And what do you suggest to use otherwise to maintain a server? I am not aware of a solution that would help here? As an attacker you could easily alias any command or even start a modified shell that logs ever keystroke and simulates the default bash/zsh or whatever.

The scenario OC stated is that if the attacker has access to the user on the server then the attacker would still need the sudo password in order to get root privileges, contrary to direct root login where the attack has direct access to root privileges.

So, now i am looking into this scenario where the attack is on the server with the user privileges: the attacker now modifies for example the bashrc to alias sudo to extract the password once the user runs sudo.

So the sudo password does not have any meaningful protection, other then maybe adding a time variable which is when the user accesses the server and runs sudo

The attacker that is currently with user privileges on the server?

Most comments here suggest 3 things

1. least privilege: Which is ok, but on a Server any modification you do requires root anyway, there is usually very little benefit
2. Additional protection through required sudo password: This is for example easily circumvented by modifying the bashrc or similar with an sudo alias to get the password
3. Multiuser & audittrails: yes this is a valid point, on a system that is modified or administered by multiple ppl there are various reasons lime access logging and UAC for that

An actual person from the pen testing world: https://youtu.be/fKuqYQdqRIs

The sudo password can be easily extracted by modifying the bashrc.

Nope, not really. The only reason ppl recommend it is, because “you have then to guess the username too”. Which is just not relevant if you use strong authentication method like keys or only strong passwords.

deleted by creator

Do you want to prevent brute forcing or do you want to prevent the attack getting in?

If you want to prevent brute forcing then software like fail2ban helps a little, but this is only a IP based block, so with IPv6 this is not really helpfull against a real attack, since rotating IP addresses is trivial. But still can slow down the attacker. Also limiting the amount of sessions and auth tries does significantly slow down the attacker.

If you just want to not worry about it set strong passwords, and when it is a multi user system where other ppl might access it, configure Public Key Auth so you can be sure the other users have strong passwords (or keys in this case) to authenticate.

With strong passwords or keys it is basically impossible to brute force your way in with ssh.

Why would you need Tailscale for syncthing?

I don’t use browser extensions and I manually copy/paste my passwords to fill in entries.

On most systems copy pasting is heavily insecure since a lot of processes have access to the clipboard. autotype and thinga like browser extensions are considered more secure.

Either you are heavily misinformed about how difficult arch is, or you lack any confidence in your ‘Linux skill’.

Choose the system you want to achieve, follow the wiki and choose the software you want to use using it and you are good to go, it really is not that hard. You can always use archinstall.

But the fragmentation on SSDs does not really matter, does it? Yes you need to keep track of all the fragments but this is not really a problem as far as i am aware. To my knowledge, increasing latency on bigger storage is a problem that faces all storage technologies we hqve atm.

You do not even need a port based firewall when the server is open on the internet.

When you configure the software to not have unnecessary open ports over the internet connected interface then a port based firewall is providing zero additional security.

A port based firewall has the benefit that you can lock everything down to the few ports you actually need, and do not have to worry about misconfigured software.

For example, something like docker circumvents ufw anyway. And i know ppl that had open ports even tho they had ufw running.

I can see where they are comming from, but i do not understand it. Remote streaming was free and is now only available via a subscription or the lifetime pass. So it is locked behind a subscription. Ofc it is more nuanced, but the title expresses really cleanly what the topic is.

Clickbait (also known as link bait or linkbait) is a text or a thumbnail link that is designed to attract attention and to entice users to follow (“click”) that link and view, read, stream or listen to the linked piece of online content, being typically deceptive, sensationalized, or otherwise misleading.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickbait

Title is not really deceptive or misleading.