That’s an interesting idea
Comment on How do you protect a remote backup from a compromised account?
lIlIllIlIIIllIlIlII@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Do pull backups instead of push backups: Backup server connects to local machine.
eyesaremosaics@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
non_burglar@lemmy.world 1 month ago
What’s the rationale for this? Genuinely curious.
bcnelson@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The reasoning is that your backup server should be more secure than production. Production has to have a bunch of stuff open in order to be useful and convenient. The backup server does not. It can be basically fully locked down.
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 1 month ago
To add - by doing pulls the backup server uses different credentials to run than the credentials used to perform pulls.
Backup server has it’s own credentials database, machines being backed up have their own database. Backup service in backup server uses appropriate credentials from machine being backed up to access the data there (shares, etc). So credentials from compromised machine are unrelated to credentials for backup server.
And if backups are done properly (full on a schedule, daily incrementals, or something similar) you should be able to revert to a known-good state with minimal data loss.
pgo_lemmy@feddit.it 1 month ago
If the main site gets compromised the credentials there must be considered lost and known to che attackers.
with a pull backup that’s not an issue because the main site has no access to the remote system; it is a process on the remote site that has credentials to access the main site and not the other way around.
the remote system may receive a compromised copy of the data, but the attacker cannot tamper with previous backups so recovery is still possible.
non_burglar@lemmy.world 1 month ago
That makes sense. I use NFS, so there are other controls for security because “offsite” is another building on my property, but still in the same pool of subnets…
lIlIllIlIIIllIlIlII@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
This is the main reason I had in my head about pull backups. Thanks for the explanation.
a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Why downvote this?