3.3. Choke Point
A
choke point
forces attackers to use a narrow channel, which you can
monitor and control. There are probably many examples of choke points
in your life: the toll booth on a bridge, the check-out line at the
supermarket, the ticket booth at a movie theatre.
In network security, the firewall between your site and the Internet
(assuming that it's the only connection between your site and
the Internet) is such a choke point; anyone who's going to
attack your site from the Internet is going to have to come through
that channel, which should be defended against such attacks. You
should be watching carefully for such attacks and be prepared to
respond if you see them.
A choke point is useless if there's an effective way for an
attacker to go around it. Why bother attacking the fortified front
door if the kitchen door around back is wide open? Similarly, from a
network security point of view, why bother attacking the firewall if
dozens or hundreds of unsecured dial-up lines could be attacked more
easily and probably more successfully?
A second Internet connection -- even an indirect one, like a
connection to another company that has its own Internet connection
elsewhere -- is an even more threatening breach. Internet-based
attackers might not have a modem available, or might not have gotten
around to acquiring phone service they don't need to pay for,
but they can certainly find even roundabout Internet connections to
your site.
A choke point may seem to be putting all your eggs in one basket, and
therefore a bad idea, but the key is that it's a basket you can
guard carefully. The alternative is to split your attention among
many different possible avenues of attack. If you split your
attention in this way, chances are that you won't be able to do
an adequate job of defending any of the avenues of attack, or that
someone will slip through one while you're busy defending
another (where the intruder may even have staged a diversion
specifically to draw your attention away from the real attack).
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3.2. Defense in Depth | | 3.4. Weakest Link |