Selfhosted

39239 readers

479 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:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Security concerns with locally self hosting publicly accessible app? (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

15 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Would I be compromising on the security of my local network and all the devices on it?

I have a ton of local-only self hosted services, some may have personal data that I would not be compromised of affected.

Now of course, I can work on securing those local services from each other, but still, the idea of opening up a port to the public seems incredibly insecure to me. Is there a way to host services publicly from a local network without compromising on security?

I know I could host on a cloud provider or VPS, but for certain things I'd prefer to keep it local (especially for things that may violate VPS providers' terms of service, like media apps)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, that's the crux. "Public for anyone to use" is a huge liability. No public service is really secure. They can be hardened but that's about it.

One way to harden a locally hosted setup could be to use Tailscale funnel. It's effectively a proxy for network traffic to one specific port of a machine on your network. You don't even need a static IP address or open ports here.

You're still vulnerable to problems with the specific service you're exposing though, so it's highly recommended to harden the service itself. Containerisation can be an option here but also systemd service hardening.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What's the effective difference security-wise between just opening a port and using a tailscale funnel to proxy the traffic on that same port?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I see two reasons:

It's a reverse proxy but at a lower layer (not exactly sure whether it's L3 or L4). Nobody knows your actual IP address, only Tailscale and they're not telling.
It does not require any port to permanently be exposed to the internet from your network/firewall. No amount of scans of the IPv4 range can find that port because it's simply not open.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That makes a lot of sense. I will set up Tailscale first then.