62
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
62 points (100.0% liked)
Selfhosted
40394 readers
305 users here now
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.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I run a private CA for client SSL.
For traditional server SSL I just use let's encrypt, although I already have the domain (less than $10 a year) for my public facing stuff, and just use a subdomain of that one for my homelab.
I have a container with openssl for the private CA and generating user certs as well as renewing the let's encrypt ones. I just use openssl without anything fancy.
The output folder is only mounted rw in that one container
I only ever mount the subfolders in read-only in other containers that need those certs.
All these containers are running on the same server so I don't even have to copy anything around, the containers don't even need connectivity between them, it's just mounted where needed.
I'd be very interested to hear your reasoning behind using a private CA for clients but using Let's encrypt for servers. Thanks for the explanation on the OpenSSL setup!
I'm just doing mutual TLS to authenticate clients which I use the pricate CA for.
I could use the orivate CA for the server instead of lets encrypt and trust that on devices, but letsencrypt is easy enough and useful for other things that I open publicly. mTLS avoids needing a vpn for more sensitive services
Did you design your lab infrastructure to operate in a zero trust security framework? I'm very interested; I never really grasped mTLS, but I'm going to try and read more about it. Thanks!
Edit: Alright, I understand the high-level concept of mTLS. Just need to check the implementation details with my reverse-proxy
Not really, although now that I have certs for those anyway, maybe I should.
More like I'm using some services on the go that I want to always work, whether I'm on the LAN or on the go.
Opening home automation or 3d printers to the Internet is unwise to say the least.
mTLS in the reverse proxy for those allows me to have more security without having to establish a VPN first.
Oh, that's a great idea! Indeed, using certificates to identify yourself would work quite well in such a scenario. Whilst I would always use a VPN server, this has given me something new to think about! Thanks!
What's nice is it provides a similar level of protection to using a VPN with PKI, but just for that specific subdomain. While a VPN would be have to be connected manually before use (or all the time), this is built-in.
The odds of someone breaking through the mTLS and breaking through that application's security at the same time are much smaller than either separately.
If you don't have a valid cert, you're dropped by the reverse proxy before anything even gets passed to the server behind it.
I'm a big fan of it.
I'll take a look, thanks!