Abel

127 reputation

bio	website	undermyhat.org
	location	Amsterdam, The Netherlands
	age	39
visits	member for	1 year, 1 month
	seen	Feb 27 at 22:50
stats	profile views	4

"Programming is like arts. The craft can be taught, but creativity must come elsewheres."

I love autumn in a German forest, I relax by playing Liszt, Debussy or Grieg and enjoy teaching skiing in winter. And between all that, I do some new product development to make a living.

20 years experience in programming from Fortran to C++ to Java to C# to F#

You can reach me at Twitter, by mail abel.braaksma@exselt.net, on my blog Under My Hat, my outsourcing and consultancy firm Abrasoft or our upcoming XSLT 3.0 Streaming processor Exselt.

	127 reputation	bio	website	undermyhat.org	visits	member for	1 year, 1 month
6 badges		location	Amsterdam, The Netherlands		seen	Feb 27 at 22:50

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Jan 2	awarded	Popular Question
Apr 2	accepted	How secure is blocking all incoming connections on my ADSL or cable router?
Mar 30	comment	How secure is blocking all incoming connections on my ADSL or cable router? That's the kind of information I was after. I still requires a user's action (so, in the case of unattended servers, we would seem pretty safe still, unless a specific vulnerability rises).
Mar 30	revised	How secure is blocking all incoming connections on my ADSL or cable router? Better title
Mar 30	comment	How secure is blocking all incoming connections on my ADSL or cable router? So, unless there's a flaw in the firewall on the router itself, you essentially say my assumptions are correct (but I shouldn't feel too safe for other reasons).
Mar 30	comment	How secure is blocking all incoming connections on my ADSL or cable router? @Ramhound: no, there's a difference between outgoing and incoming connections. I only disallow incoming connections. The firewall knows the difference from NEW / ESTABLISHED as explained here. So once a connection is established (i.e., to this very server serving this page) the firewall knows the incoming traffic is connected to my outgoing request. TCP is a connection-based protocol, as opposed to UDP.
Mar 30	asked	How secure is blocking all incoming connections on my ADSL or cable router?
Mar 30	comment	How secure can IP based login be? @MarkScrano: I was thinking of the Internet WAN, actually, and that's not so trivial, but user B.W. answered this can be done with BGP attacks for one. But in either case, "100%" in this answer is too strong a number.
Mar 30	comment	How secure can IP based login be? Excellent, that's a clear cut story. Apparently, BGP attacks can happen anywhere, anytime without someone noticing easily. The last line is troubling: "ISPs, he said, have been holding their breath, 'hoping that people don’t discover (this) and exploit it.'"
Mar 29	awarded	Editor
Mar 29	revised	How secure can IP based login be? Probably better to use quotation instead of code-sections.
Mar 29	awarded	Scholar
Mar 29	accepted	How secure can IP based login be?
Mar 29	comment	How secure can IP based login be? On the Wikipedia article on IP spoofing it is mentioned that with some effort, it is possible to redirect a response back to a spoofed address. It might be that they mean through a man in the middle or another form of hijacking, but I didn't get that impression. Are you positive on the 100% figure?
Mar 29	comment	How secure can IP based login be? The actual scenario, I should've said, is to limit access by IP addresses on the LAN or on the VPN network. However, word has it, that the client would like access from some people's homes as well. It should be said that the application is hosted under another app that does require authentication, but then it just uses unsecure HTTP requests. All it then takes is picking up the URL (plus the IP spoofing/hijacking) to gain access. At least that's what I think.
Mar 29	comment	How secure can IP based login be? It's kind of interesting that none of these answers (nor in the linked question) explain how a spoofed IP address can receive an answer from the server, other than the obvious man in the middle attack. Ramhound below even says it is 100% impossible. Of course, this is only one aspect of the problems with IP address authentication.
Mar 29	comment	How secure can IP based login be? @Ramhound: I'm not sure which, but I encountered it in several of them. Probably some Apache security book, my PKI book etc, but it's a while ago, and I just know I read it several times somewhere (sorry, not a very substantive answer).
Mar 29	awarded	Supporter
Mar 29	suggested	suggested edit on How secure can IP based login be?
Mar 29	awarded	Student