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Hosting Providers and Log Security

Adrian Lane December 26, 2009 6 Comments

An interesting discussion popped up on Slashdot this Saturday afternoon about Preventing My Hosting Provider From Rooting My Server. ‘hacker’ is claiming that when he accuses his hosting provider of service interruption, they assume root access on his machines without permission. “I have a heavily-hit public server (web, mail, cvs/svn/git, dns, etc.) that runs a few dozen OSS project websites, as well as my own personal sites (gallery, blog, etc.). From time to time, the server has ‘unexpected’ outages, which I’ve determined to be the result of hardware, network and other issues on behalf of the provider. I run a lot of monitoring and logging on the server-side, so I see and graph every single bit and byte in and out of the server and applications, so I know it’s not the OS itself. When I file ‘WTF?’-style support tickets to the provider through their web-based ticketing system, I often get the response of: ‘Please provide us with the root password to your server so we can analyze your logs for the cause of the outage.’ Moments ago, there were three simultaneous outages while I was logged into the server working on some projects. Server-side, everything was fine. They asked me for the root password, which I flatly denied (as I always do), and then they rooted the server anyway, bringing it down and poking around through my logs. This is at least the third time they’ve done this without my approval or consent. Is it possible to create a minimal Linux boot that will allow me to reboot the server remotely, come back up with basic networking and ssh, and then from there, allow me to log in and mount the other application and data partitions under dm-crypt/loop-aes and friends?” Ignoring for a moment the basic problem of requesting assistance while not wishing to provide access, how do you protect the servers from remote hosting administrators? If someone else has physical access to your machine, even if you machine is virtual, a skilled attacker will gain access to your data regardless. It’s not clear if the physical machine is owned by ‘hacker’ or if it is just leased server capacity, but it seems to me that if you want to keep remote administrators of average skill from rooting your server and then rummaging around in your files, disk encryption would be an effective choice. You have the issue of needing to supply credentials remotely upon reboot, but this would be effective in protecting log data. If you need better security, place the server under your physical control, or all bets are off. Share:

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