[servercobra]

Can someone explain to me the benefits of limiting the IPs that can SSH into the bastion? It seems to me the main thing that's protecting against are misconfigurations of SSH (accidentally letting root log in with no password or something) or a zero day in SSH but I'm not convinced by either.

[talideon]

The company I work for does it so that bastions hosted on some public cloud hosting service are only accessible from the company network or by machines connected to its VPN. We handle _very_ sensitive data, and some engineer screwing up the configuration for a bastion would be _very_ bad. Defence in depth is important.

[AtNightWeCode]

What do you want to be paranoid about? One access point or a million access points?

[justinludwig]

Also adds defense-in-depth against stolen credentials -- it means an attacker can't just exfiltrate stolen SSH credentials to use sometime later from somewhere else on the Internet (or sell them / pass them along to a different specialist) -- the attacker either has to use them in-place, or break into some other machine that's also on the allow-list.

[xvector]

> misconfigurations of SSH (accidentally letting root log in with no password or something) or a zero day in SSH

these are entirely valid concerns. defense in depth, principal of least privilege. humans make errors.