[bongodongobob]

Not allowing random VPN connections on a LAN is pretty standard. I've been surprised at how many people here are able to use tailscale and the like. Guessing it's just because there are likely smaller teams here that don't have any kind of managed network.

[c0balt]

About that, we actually tried (with support from the network team) to open a small VPN Fron our office for some mobile devices as part of an event installation. Just plain wireguard on a public IP.

After two weeks of back and forth the wireguard packets were still being discarded somewhere by a firewall/router thanks to "deny VPNs by default". Tailscale got through those immediately though by using their relays + one of the workarounds for standard wireguard ports being blocked. Point being, the service provided by a mature solution like Tailscale for punching through networks is surprisingly effective even for corporate-level networks.

[antonvs]

Smaller teams, yes, but also it seems as though the SaaS explosion has led to many enterprises significantly relaxing the "hardness" of their network boundaries, at least when it comes to integration with companies whose services they depend on. I've seen Tailscale and tools like ngrok being approved to get into large enterprises who you might think wouldn't allow it. Some of these enterprises will set up a bastion in a DMZ to control that, but I've been surprised by how many don't do that.

That relaxation tends to have ripple effects - once you allow tunneling tools in for one purpose - like SaaS integration - then it becomes more normalized and people start using it for other purposes.

[observationist]

Someone is making your IT team do extra work without a good understanding of their systems if they're banning tailscale or granting special network level access thinking that ip or mac address based profiling is secure.

Your network should be zero trust. That means you want to treat every host that connects as if it's on the public internet; the corollary to that is you should give your hosts access to the public internet, unrestricted, and treat your users like adults who don't need micromanaging or constant surveillance (do sane logging, ofc.)

If you need a host that's subject to continuous surveillance, design it as such and require remote access with MFA, and so on.

Give your end users as much freedom as possible, and only constrict it where necessary, or you're going to incentivize shadow IT, unintended consequences, and a whole lot of unnecessary make-work that doesn't contribute to security.

Unrestricted access forces change management, design choices, and policy to confront each user and device for the attack vector they are, and to behave accordingly.

[panarky]

And then a few of those users who you treated like adults who don't need surveillance make a private network among themselves and other nodes in Russia and China to exfiltrate the corporation's most sensitive intellectual property, serve as a bridge for state-sponsored bad actors to bypass your firewall, and tunnel command-and-control traffic through your "unrestricted" egress, and now your zero-trust philosophy has created a zero-accountability blind spot that your IR team discovers eighteen months later during a breach investigation.

[idiotsecant]

If your threat is state sponsored bad actors you've already failed. OK, great you blocked VPNs. Now they tunneled their vpn through as HTTPS. You successfully annoyed all your legit users and completely failed to stop the real problem.

[wkat4242]

Https is also inspected in our place and has been for a decade.

Also there's different classes of state sponsored APT groups. You won't stand a chance against the NSA but there's a lot of state sponsored groups in Russia that are just looking for low hanging fruit to get some foreign money for their regime.

[hugo1789]

What’s the alternative—locking down all legitimate users and still losing the data anyway?

Network controls alone don’t stop exfiltration. HDMI/DP can move data faster than most consumer NICs. Does the system account for that scenario?

[wkat4242]

It's a matter of layers. Banning VPNs isn't a perfect measure. But it makes it a lot easier than when you let everyone cowboy around.

Same with RBAC. It's not perfect because some people need legit access to stuff and it can be abused. But it makes it much harder for bad actors.

[panarky]

> Network controls alone don’t stop exfiltration.

Stop signs alone don't stop all traffic accidents.

[sh3rl0ck]

You know, that makes sense for a corporate network. They have an extremely aggressive firewall on the academic campus, which is how it should be.

However, they have failed to provide isolated networks for the research labs which just need it for even downloading LLMs (they have banned huggingface!).

Moreover, a hostel is residential. They should provide either the option of getting an external connection (which I would happily do!) or provide a means of non-stupid internet which they aren't.

[observationist]

Then you've failed in security infrastructure, policy, and enforcement, and you've infantilized your users and wasted a bunch of IT time on checking boxes. The real power move in that case would be ensuring some third party vendor checked the boxes for you, so that your ass gets sufficiently covered and you have a narrative that goes something like "well, we did everything you're supposed to, those pesky superhackers are just soooo devious and skilled that they can get anywhere!"

The actual fix for things like that is to ensure that your sensitive data is properly protected, and things that you don't want exfiltrated aren't put into scenarios where exfiltration is possible. If you need to compromise on security for practicality, then make those exceptions highly monitored with multiple people involved in custody and verification. Zero trust means you don't give any of your users or host devices any trust at all, and modern security software can require multiple party approvals and MFA.

You can use a phone to scan documents as you scroll through them, or mitm hardware devices that appear to be part of a cable, or all sorts of sneaky shenanigans, and it's a never-ending arms race, so you have to decide what level of convenience is worth what level of risk and make policies enforceable and auditable. In some cases that might mean SCIF level security with metal detectors and armed guards, in other cases it might mean ensuring a good password policy for zip files shared via email.

Inconveniencing users by limiting web access and doing the TSA style performative security thing is counterproductive. This doesn't mean you give them install rights, or you don't log web activity, or run endpoint malware scanning, or have advanced unusual activity monitoring on the network and so forth. It just means if Sally from accounting wants to go shopping for ugly christmas sweaters for staff on Etsy, she doesn't have to fill out forms in triplicate and wait 3 months while the IT department gets approvals and management has meetings and the third party security vendor does a policy review and assessment before signing off on it, or telling her no.

[sh3rl0ck]

Exactly.

I'm from a cybersec and devops background, and the IT admin here is just an ancient family-appointed person with no idea of how stuff works and with a lot to gain from under the table corporate dealings.

This is a man who believes that 15 megabit is sufficient bandwidth for CompSci students in their hostels (not the college, mind you, the hostel specifically) and decided that banning games was a "hero move".

Vendor locked into Sophos and a custom third party provider, these people have zero idea about what they're doing. I've met them various times and had various discussions up and down the org chart - this is a man who thinks he should have full access to every student's browsing history in their own time and that all VPNs are the same (he doesn't know how VPNs work btw) and allow for evasion from their network policies.

It's all a bit cursed because he fear-mongers the upper echelons of the college administration by showing them made up logs saying "students are hacking the network" to justify this.