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The "safest" way of self hosting
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this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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I'll assume you mean what I mean when I say I want to be safe with my self hosting -- that is, "safe" but also easily accessible enough that my friends/family don't balk the first time they try to log in or reset their password. There are all kinds of strategies you can use to protect your data, but I'll cover the few that I find to be reasonable.
Port Forwarding -- as someone mentioned already, port forwarding raw internet traffic to a server is probably a bad idea based on the information given. Especially since it isn't strictly necessary.
Consumer Grade Tunnel Services -- I'm sure there are others, but cloudflare tunnels can be a safer option of exposing a service to the public internet.
Personal VPN (my pick) -- if your number of users is small, it may be easiest to set up a private VPN. This has the added benefit of making things like PiHole available to all of your devices wherever you go. Popular options include Tailscale (easiest, but relies on trusting Tailscale) or Wireguard/OpenVPN (bare bones with excellent documentation). I think there are similar options to tailscale through NordVPN (and probably others), where it "magically" handles connecting your devices but then you face a ~5 device limit.
With Wireguard or OpenVPN you may ask: "How do I do that without opening a port? You just said that was a bad idea!" Well, the best way that I have come up with is to use a VPS (providers include Digital Ocean, Linode to name a few) where you typically get a public IP address for free (as in free beer). You still have a public port open in your virtual private network, but it's an acceptable risk (in my mind, for my threat model) given it's on a machine that you don't own or care about. You can wipe that VPS machine any time you want, the cost is time.
It's all a trade-off. You can go to much further lengths than I've described here to be "safer" but this is the threshold that I've found to be easy and Good Enough for Me™.
If I were starting over I would start with Tailscale and work up from there. There are many many good options and only you can decide which one is best for your situation!
I don't mean to take issue with you specifically, but I see this stated in this community a lot.
For newbies I can agree with the sentiment "generally" - but this community seems to have gotten into some weird cargo-cult style thinking about this. "Port forwarding" is not a bad idea end of discussion. It's a bad idea to expose a service if you haven't taken any security precautions for on a system that is not being maintained. But exposing a wireguard service on a system which you keep up-to-date is not inherently a bad thing. Bonus points if VPN is all it does and has restricted local accounts.
In fact of all the services homegamers talk about running in their homelab wireguard is one of the safest to expose to the internet. It has no "well-known port" so it's difficult to scan for. It uses UDP which is also difficult to scan for. It has great community support so there will be security patches. It's very difficult to configure in an insecure way (I can't even think of how one can). And it requires public/private key auth rather than allowing user-generated passwords. They don't even allow you to pick insecure encryption algorithms like other VPNs do. It's a great choice for a home VPN.
You make a great point. I really shouldn't contribute to the boogeyman-ification of port forwarding.
I certainly agree there is nothing inherently wrong or dangerous with port forwarding in and of itself. It's like saying a hammer is bad. Not true in the slightest! A newbie swinging it around like there's no tomorrow might smack their fingers a few times, but that's no fault of hammer :)
Port forwarding is a tool, and is great/necessary for many jobs. For my use case I love that Wireguard offers a great alternative that: completes my goal, forces the use of keys, and makes it easy to do so.
Glad you didn't take my comment as being "aggressive" since it certainly wasn't meant to be. :-)
Wireguard is a game-changer to me. Any other VPN I've tried to setup makes the user make too many decisions that require a fair amount of knowledge. Just by making good decisions on your behalf and simplifying the configuration they've done a great job of helping to secure the internet. An often overlooked piece of security is that "making it easier to do something the right way is good for security."
Right!! Just like anything there's a trade-off.
Glad you phrased the well-intentioned (and fair) critique in a kind way! I love it when there's good discourse around these topics
There's a BIG difference here. Don’t be afraid to expose the Wireguard port because if someone tried to connect and they don’t authenticate with the right key the server will silently drop the packets.
OpenVPN is very noisy and you'll know if someone is running it on a specific port while Wireguard you'll have no way to tell it's running.