Author: Kenneth Kron

OSPS - (ô sp -s z ) as in auspices. Obfuscated Server Port Service.

OSPS is a service port generator and cryptographic communication system. OSPS is designed to make it easier for you to implement need-to-know security for your server port #'s. OSPS is a simple but effective system for making your private services that much harder to hack. If your IDS/IPS is working then you should be fairly able to detect a port scan looking for open services and you can defend against those to a degree but if you are running your services on WKS ports then scanning isn't required nor is any “man in the middle attack”. OSPS is designed to hide the service port #'s from those who do not need to know and yet make them available to those who do need to know.

Services running under the OSPS of OSPS get their listening port number randomly generated on a regular basis. When it's time to choose a new port OSPS generates the port # and restarts the service. OSPS then uses public key encryption to encrypt the new port # information for all of the authorized users of the service and then places that file in a well known location. Since it is encrypted the port # file can even be placed in a public location, emailed to all authorized users or placed in a well know but secure location all of which is supported by OSPS.

How does OSPS work.

Generating new port numbers for services. The operation of OSPS has been modeled after chkconfig which should be familiar to modern system admins.

Invocation:

osps --debug=\d+ --verbose --ffile {path to OSPSified config file}

An OSPSified config file will contain the following lines at the start of the file

# OSPS v.$x as the first line.

# osps: port_range=n-m {Acceptable port range}

# osps: encryptor (encryptor and argument list)

# osps: user list (this list will be passed to encryptor & notify if notify = mail)

# osps: notify (none|mail|/path/to/status/file)

and optionally

#osps: additional files (absolute path to additional OSPSified configuration files which need to be synchronized with this configuration file.

If any of these lines is non-existent osps will exit with an error message.

Scheduling:

OSPS contains no scheduling information on how often to regenerate port #'s OSPS expects to be called by a scheduler/security system when it's time to change port #'s.

OSPS reads /etc/OSPS.conf to decide get it's task list.