On: Amazon's customer service backdoor

[MertsA]

At this point, 16 bits of entropy is more than the entropy of a lot of the passwords that I've seen.

[richardwhiuk → MertsA]

You have 10 bits of entropy at best, unless you put it above 1024, at which point if it dies, any none privileged user on the box can sniff passwords.

[Dylan16807 → richardwhiuk]

Why are you using passwords for SSH?

Do you actually have untrusted users on the box?

Why would you not secure the custom port to root-only?

[arielb1 → richardwhiuk]

If you are serious, you should limit SSH access to a bastion host with no unprivileged users.