IP Whitelisting: A Brittle And Inflexible Security Solution
IP whitelisting is inflexible, obscure & poorly documented. It can lead to expensive incidents & brittle architectures. Consider alternatives: ethernet cables, point-to-point VPNs or API keys for trusted system communication.
All systems in the same network can communicate with each other freely, from the lowest layers of sending frames and packets, to RPC calls, etc. This implies that we have the same trust in all systems, for example, they are all managed by the same IT team. Sometimes you have systems in the same network that mostly don't trust each other, for example, system interfaces that are Internet facing. So you create rules using firewalls, proxies, VPNs, API calls authenticated with API keys, etc, to enable trusted communication among the systems and applications that your either manage, or you decide t...