And in what way does having a "new" protocol help? At worst you've now got yet another point of ingress (through a new, untested protocol and its implementations no less) in addition to the existing ones (because in all likelihood you're not going to supplant them and someone will insist on still using them (c.f. the installed base of Netscape 4.76 browsers just now disappearing)). At best you've pushed the problem around . . . to a new, untested protocol and its new untested implementations; you might see some benefit in that not many black hats know about it enough to start jiggling the doorknobs, but security through obscurity isn't.

I guess one person can make a difference, but most of the time, they probably shouldn't. – Marge Simpson

Update: Not that you're incorrect that you want to stop someone as far out as you can, but a new protocol's not necessarily the best way to do that. Things like port knocking or running on non-standard ports (or better yet port knocking to connect to a non-standard port :) reduce the visibility of the service, but if the underlying protocol (say) uses rot13 or its analogue to hide user credentials (HTTP Basic authentication, I'm looking at you . . .) it doesn't gain you much.

If all you're doing is moving a service using an existing protocol to a different port you haven't gained much. If you're using a new protocol, you're tossing out years of live field testing. Things like SSH and TLS have been gone over by experts (white and black hatted both) and are at this point pretty much algorithmically sound and most of the exploits are against implementation bugs not protocol flaws.

And an aside, one of the laments I remember seeing a while back was the problem that putting everything over HTTP makes it harder to lock down access at the network layer since everything is going through one port rather than separate ports for separate protocols. Coming full circle I guess.

In reply to Re^3: How to implement a fourth protocol by Fletch
in thread How to implement a fourth protocol by Moron

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