Re: [gentoo-user] tips on running a mail server in a cheap vps provider run but not-so-trusty admins?

[Grant Taylor]

On 8/28/20 6:10 PM, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> I think I see where we're diverging: I'm assuming that the employees of
> the VPS provider can hop onto any running system with root privileges.

Perhaps I'm woefully ignorant, but my current working understanding is 
that no virtual machine hypervisor solution provides a way for someone 
at the hypervisor level to access a guest VM as if they were root.  They 
still need to connect to a terminal (be it console or serial or ssh or 
other), log in (with credentials that they should not have) and access 
things that way.

I see little difference in the full (fat) VM compared to a stand alone 
server.  Safe for the fact that there are ways to cross access memory. 
Though I think those types of things are decidedly atypical.

My mental security model probably completely fails for containers.

> I suppose you can make that pretty annoying to do. If you're willing to
> encrypt everything, then you can even put /boot on the encrypted disk,
> unlocking it in (say) grub. The VPS provider can still replace grub
> with something that faxes them your password, but it's not totally
> trivial.  (How are you accessing the console at boot time? Is it using
> software from the VPS provider? It's turtles all the way to hell.)

I'm actually not encrypting the full VM.  I have an encrypted disk.  The 
VM boots like normal, I log in, unlock the encrypted disk, mount it, and 
start services.

So, I feel like I've done the things that I reasonably can do to protect 
my email.

Or said another way, I'm not sure what else I could do that would not 
also apply to a co-lo server.

My VPS provider does offer the ability to access a console so I could 
use full encrypted system.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die