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Joel_Mckay01/21/20250 repliesview on HN

Detecting physical ingress in a co-location server is not uncommon after contacting political representatives in some countries. It is wise to have password protected SSL certs as the bare minimum non-resettable tripwire, close monitoring of the HDD/SSD drives s.m.a.r.t. firmware power-cycle counter, and of course an encrypted partition for logs and other mutable/sensitive content. Note for performance, a "sudo debsums -sac" command along with other tripwire software can audit unencrypted system binaries efficiently. Most modern ephemeral malware (on android especially) is not written to disk to avoid forensic audits assigning accountability, as the chance of re-infection is higher if you hide the exploit methodology.

Folks should operate like they already have someone with a leaked instance of their key files. In general, a offline key-self-signing authority issuing client/peer certs is also important, as on rare occasion one can't trust 3rd parties not to re-issue certs for Google/Facebook/Github etc. to jack users.

Eventually one should localize your database design to specific users, and embed user action telemetry into a design. i.e. damage or hostile activity is inherently limited to a specific users content, sanity checking quota systems limit the damage they can cause, and windowed data-lifecycle limits the credentials to read-only or does garbage collection after some time.

In general, the rabbitMQ AMQP over SSL client signed cert credential system has proven rather reliable. Erlang/Elixir is far from perfect, but it can be made fairly robust with firewall rules.

Good luck, YMMV of course... =3