I currently have a home server which I use a lot and has a few important things in it, so I kindly ask help making this setup safer.
I have an openWRT router on my home network with firewall active. The only open ports are 443 (for all my services) and 853 (for DoT).
I am behind NAT, but I have ipv6, so I use a domain to point to my ipv6, which is how I access my serves when I am not on lan and share stuff with friends.
On port 443 I have nginx acting as a reverse proxy to all my services, and on port 853 I have adguardhome. I use a letsencrypt certificate with this proxy.
Both nginx, adguardhome and almost all of my services are running in containers. I use rootless podman for containers. My network driver is pasta, and no container has “–net host”, although the containers can access host services because they have the option “–map-guest-addr” set, so I don’t know if this is any safer then “–net host”.
I have two means of accessing the server via ssh, either password+2fa or ssh key, but ssh port is lan only so I believe this is fine.
My main concern is, I have a lot of personal data on this server, some things that I access only locally, such as family photos and docs (these are literally not acessible over wan and I wouldnt want them to be), and some less critical things which are indeed acessible externally, such as my calendars and tasks (using caldav and baikal), for exemple.
I run daily encrypted backups into OneDrive using restic+backrest, so if the server where to die I believe this would be fine. But I wouldnt want anyone to actually get access to that data. Although I believe more likely than not an invader would be more interested in running cryptominers or something like that.
I am not concerned about dos attacks, because I don’t think I am a worthy target and even if it were to happen I can wait a few hours to turn the server back on.
I have heard a lot about wireguard - but I don’t really understand how it adds security. I would basically change the ports I open. Or am I missing something?
So I was hoping we could talk about ways to improve my servers security.
Just close 443 and use VPN with ACME DNS challenges for your certs. That’ll help make it even more secure, nothing is full proof though and a VPN is a good first step
Thanks for replying!
I do use dns challanges for renewing my certs. But I use port 443 for application data, not for certs.
Is a vpn always safer then a reverse proxy? Do you use wireguard or do you have any other options worth looking into?
Depends on what you trust, I guess.
A reverse proxy on a standard cert is a bigger target for automated scripts than a reverse proxy on a non-standard port. A VPN runs through the VPN’s authentication, whereas a reverse proxy relies on whatever that app’s authentication is. So whether it’s secure enough depends on the VPN configuration, what you’re hosting, etc.
I’m behind CGNAT, so I have limitations you don’t, but here’s my setup:
I like this approach because I can eat my cake (nice domain names instead of IPs and ports) and have it too (fast connection inside LAN, can disable reverse proxy if I want better security). You could get the same w/o the VPS, and if you require WireGuard VPN access outside the LAN, you get better security than a public-facing service.
I didnt mention on my original post but I do have a virtual machine on gcp, which I use to run mongodb. I didnt mention it because I am not too concerned with it, but mostly it follows the same practices, with the exception being that ssh is open and it has no private data in it.
But I suppose I could do something similiar to what you mentioned. The ideia of having and eating the cake is very nice. And if something goes wrong I could turn of public access and have the vpn still working.
I will consider implementing something like that as well, thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts!
I still use a reverse proxy, but to get into my network you need to be on VPN. It’s more secure for me I guess.
I use traefik forward auth, even inside my network on VPN, for an extra layer of security for some apps.
My opinion is that port 443 getting accidentally misconfigured by me is just too likely a scenario. With wireguard on my router I also am able to restrict traffic to ONLY my webserver and DNS servers for my devices.
So I guess that’s another positive of wireguard, you can use your own DNS servers for all your phones all the time and always have ad blocking with pihole or something similar, even on mobile.
By using VPN I don’t have to worry about accidentally exposing a website with a copy paste error or something over my reverse proxy. I can also easily restrict who has access to my VPN and do routing rules from my router per device or subnet (for people who aren’t in my family I have a separate subnet I assign with more strict firewall rules)