Cloud Security

Updated 20-Sep-2023

A development server recently became compromised, and while this isn't necessarily a good thing, it does raise awareness and provides impetus to strengthen security measures.

Access Control

A few axioms:

  • Access control is better through certificates (what you have) than passwords (what you know)
  • Two-factor authentication is better than both (what you have + new knowledge communicated)
  • The point is to be reasonably hardened, but have monitoring which alerts upon compromise (intrusion detection)
  • Regularly conducted penetration testing should help inform the hardening process
  • Encryption is necessary, eventually end-to-end but in any case when logins are being used
  • Apache is a big attack vector, so keep it patched, and with limited rights
  • Various exploits against web content and databases, security-aware software development standards required
  • Simple is better, because simple gets done where complicated does not
  • Users should not share accounts
  • Have a disaster recovery process because there will be a future when it will need to be used