Things to worry about as my kid goes online: (A parent/hacker's perspective)

Well it was bound to happen, my kid has gotten older and he wants to have his own computer, sync his iPod Touch on his own and choose what (read: approved by mom and dad) apps are loaded on it, and he likes the idea of using Skype to call me and his mother from his room upstairs.  Why is this so alien?  Well, for starters, he is five. I can't clearly recall what I was excited about when I was five, but I am sure it probably involved Army Men and being outside.  Sheesh.  

There was a media sensationalized buzz storm (or just "Media BS" for short) this week about how most people apparently don't know about CTRL-F; well I don't find this shocking for two reasons.  One, most people don't know much about anything they use; this is why we call them "users."  Two, my five-year-old knows a few sight words like "dog, cat, mom, dad, print, open, yes, no, load, save" but otherwise really can't read, and yet he can use Windows, OS X, and iOS with such efficiency one might believe he was quite literate.  His first day of kindergarten is Tuesday, so my fears will only grow as he actually does learn how to read. It's bad enough he can cruse YouTube all on his own and find all manor of cartoons to watch.  I am dreading the day he can do text searches.  

So what is a parent to do?  Well, if I learned one thing from my parents - I am not trusting him to make good decisions without proper guidance.  So the computer gets locked down, and I am running a transparent proxy on the network to filter online content. (I did say this was a hacker's perspective on this topic, so don't expect simple solutions.)  VNC is already on his little Windows machine so we can watch what he is looking at even from our smart phones.  I now have some dedicated space on my second monitor to keep his desktop in constant view.  

We had a lot of fun setting up his computer.  I used an old machine I had sitting in the corner of my office.  And, it was amazing for me to see his little eyes light up, and the onslaught of questions made me laugh several times.  Try this one on for size: "Dad! Why is it called a mouse?" "Because the cord looks like a tail and it is kind of mouse shaped." "Cord? It doesn't have a cord!" "Oh, well back in the 'old days' they had cords... I didn't notice they were all gone now."  This was only made even cooler when he found an old SGI three-button mouse in one of the bins and asked "Can I use this rock-looking mouse with the cord!  Because this one looks like a mouse, made out of rock!"  It's the old classic gray speckled SGI mouse, which does kind of resemble a rock texture.  So cool!  My kid has an old school mouse with a ball, three-buttons, and a "tail!"  Win for me because it won't eat up AA batteries like the wireless one does.  

Back to securing the kiddo then - The firewall has been set to permit his IP, statically assigned by the DHCP server specifically to his MAC address, access to the Internet only during certain hours.  I can always amend this if he is being punished - thus I can "take away the Internet" if it is needed.  Once he gets smart enough to manually assign himself a new IP he will find that his personal VLAN only allows his one IP address access to the gateway.  I figure he is my kid, and for all I know this stuff is genetic, so I better take precautions.  At the rate he is going, hex math and figuring out subnets isn't going to be too far away.  If he is really naughty I will just put his port into admin disable mode and cut off access to the media server and other household resources such as printers, Sling Boxes, thermostats, gaming VLANs, etc.  This brings up another point, he isn't on the wireless network.  Why, because while I take precautions in keeping wifi isolated in many ways from my local LAN and enable the strongest encryption I can on the AP, I don't need some doorknob down the block watching what my kid does online or for that matter hijacking his sessions.  I don't trust wireless and the most valuable thing I am protecting on my home network is now my progeny.  I take this same precaution when the content for my employer is high value.  

I might even write MAC filters to restrict his mobile devices, right now an old iPod Touch but who knows what the future holds. I think a lot of parents focus on the computers, using things like Net Nanny etc., but they bypass the game consoles and mobile devices the kids walk around with.  I wrote in an earlier blog that you need, much like in corporate security, to do as much as you can with the infrastructure and on the wire rather then on the endpoint.  Especially when working on my household budget vs. a GL that I manage at work.  

I can't wait to really start teaching him how to do things.  Phase-one will be loosing Windows on his little workstation and replacing it with something more "admin" and less "user."  Probably a *NIX distro of some format, maybe a boot for Windows still left just for school work.  Our home has quite the enterprise level network with full on VPN concentrators to switches that support layer 2 and layer 3 filtering, true firewalls and a plethora of servers and services to explore right down to running our own DNS cache and MTA.  And why not, it's what I do for a living.  I bet he has his first sysadmin job while still in high school.  Great, I am that stereotypical dad trying to mold his son - except this isn't me hoping he will get a football scholarship, it's me hoping he will be even better than me one day at all things network and computer related.  Or, at least not some user who doesn't know the UI on most all operating systems has a search function enabled by CTRL (or command on a MAC) and the letter F  as in short for "Find. "

I'll write more on this topic as things develop and my son tries to work around my security. You know, because I will be teaching him how to do so and how it all is suppose to work... thus, how it doesn't.  (It's a hacker thing, it makes more sense when you don't think about it.)  

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