Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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One aspect is how interesting you are as a target. What would a possible attacker gain by getting access to your services or hosts?
The danger to get hacked is there but you are not Microsoft, amazon or PayPal. Expect login attempts and port scans from actors who map out the internets. But I doubt someone would spend much effort to break into your hosts if you do not make it easy (like scripted automatic exploits and known passwords login attempts easy) .
DDOS protection isn't something a tiny self hosted instance would need (at least in my experience).
Firewall your hosts, maybe use a reverse proxy and only expose the necessary services. Use secure passwords (different for each service), add fail2ban or the like if you're paranoid. Maybe look into MFA. Use a DMZ (yes, VLANs could be involved here). Keep your software updated so that exploits don't work. Have backups if something breaks or gets broken.
In my experience the biggest danger to my services is my laziness. It takes steady low level effort to keep the instances updated and running. (Yes there are automated update mechanisms - unattended upgrades i.e. -, but also downwards compatibility breaking changes in the software which will require manual interactions by me.)
+1 post.
I would suggest definitely reverse proxy. Caddy should be trivial in this use case.
cheers,
Reverse proxies don't add security.
I have a dozen services running on a myriad of ports. My reverse proxy setup allows me to map hostnames to those services and expose only 80/443 to the web, plus the fact that an entity needs to know a hostname now instead of just an exposed port. IPS signatures can help identify abstract hostname scans and the proxy can be configured to permit only designated sources. Reverse proxies also commonly get used to allow for SSL offloading to permit clear text observation of traffic between the proxy and the backing host. Plenty of other use cases for them out there too, don't think of it as some one trick off/on access gateway tool
The mapping is helpful but not a security benefit. The latter can be done with a firewall.
Yes. But that's no longer just a reverse proxy. The reverse proxy isn't itself a security tool.
I see a lot of vacuous security advice in this forum. "Install a firewall", "install a reverse proxy", etc. This is mostly useless advice. Yes, do those things but they do not add any protection to the service you are exposing.
A firewall only protects you from exposing services you didn't want to expose (e.g. NFS or some other service running on the same system), and the rproxy just allows for host based routing. In both cases your service is still exposed to the internet. Directly or indirectly makes no significant difference.
What we should be advising people to do is "use a valid ssl certificate, ensure you don't use any application default passwords, use very good passwords where you do use them, and keep your services and servers up-to-date".
A firewall allowing port 443 in and an rproxy happily forwarding traffic to a vulnerable server is of no help.
They're a part of the mix. Firewalls, Proxies, WAF (often built into a proxy), IPS, AV, and whatever intelligence systems one may like work together to do their tasks. Visibility of traffic is important as well as the management burden being low enough. I used to have to manually log into several boxes on a regular basis to update software, certs, and configs, now a majority of that is automated and I just get an email to schedule a restart if needed.
A reverse proxy can be a lot more than just host based routing though. Take something like a Bluecoat or F5 and look at the options on it. Now you might say it's not a proxy then because it does X/Y/Z but at the heart of things creating that bridged intercept for the traffic is still the core functionality.
You can’t port map the same port to different services on a firewall. Reverse proxy lets you open one port and have multiple services on it. Firewall can protect exposed services one I geoip block every country but my own two use crowded to block what they consider malicious ips.