Category: Security

31 January 2026

Eating the Elephant

Cisco ISE is a beast. As friendly as a Serbian bouncer, with a learning curve like the face of El Capitan, and as intuitive as shoe shopping for a fish. The official Cisco book on it: (https://www.ciscopress.com/store/ccnp-security-identity-management-sise-300-715-official-9780136677734) is over 1,000 pages long and each page is packed full of chewy techy goodness. Nonetheless, if you work in network security, ISE is probably something you should […]

Firewalls Security

5 July 2020

Securing SFTP?

I recently came upon a situation where there was a request to allow an SFTP connection out to the Internet for secure file transfer. My previous posts have been concerned with stopping SSH tunnels on non-standard ports but some may have viewed this as an academic exercise as most enterprises insist outbound connections are made through a proxy server. A proxy understands HTTP (including HTTPS […]

Security

8 May 2020

SSH Forwarding (Part 2)

Again nothing earth-shattering here, a simple exercise building on the previous post. What do we want to do? This time we want to build a tunnel from a Windows host to a Linux one using the ssh utility Putty and then connect back to the Windows host down the tunnel using a remote desktop program. The Lab Setup You’ll notice the employment of the same […]

Security

2 May 2020

SSH Forwarding (Part 1)

SSH Remote Forwarding It’s not news to a lot of people that SSH can be used to create tunnels to defeat simple port-based filtering devices and although I knew about it, I’d never actually tried it till I did: What do we want to do? So let’s imagine we want HostA to connect to HostB on port 80 which typically is used for http. (The […]