this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
64 points (95.7% liked)

Selfhosted

40439 readers
786 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:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. 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.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

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

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
ruud
Loki
CannaVet
devve
HybridSarcasm
[email protected]
64
Are you exposing any ports on your home server? (self.selfhosted)
submitted 1 year ago by fhein to c/selfhosted
85 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Maybe I'm using the wrong terms, but what I'm wondering is if people are running services at home that they've made accessible from the internet. I.e. not open to the public, only so that they can use their own services from anywhere.

I'm paranoid a f when it comes to our home server, and even as a fairly experienced Linux user and programmer I don't trust myself when it comes to computer security. However, it would be very convenient if my wife and I could access our self-hosted services when away from home. Or perhaps even make an album public and share a link with a few friends (e.g. Nextcloud, but I haven't set that up yet).

Currently all our services run in docker containers, with separate user accounts, but I wouldn't trust that to be 100% safe. Is there some kind of idiot proof way to expose one of the services to the internet without risking the integrity of the whole server in case it somehow gets compromised?

How are the rest of you reasoning about security? Renting a VPS for anything exposed? Using some kind of VPN to connect your phones to home network? Would you trust something like Nextcloud over HTTPS to never get hacked?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have https open along with a non-standard port for ssh. Just for fun, I have the standard ssh port open, but redirecting to a Raspberry Pi running a honeypot. It's fun to mess with foreign bots trying to access my network.

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

Do you see much activity there?

I know that they say that security through obscurity doesn’t work, but to me (a novice) it sounds like a good idea to route the default port to a dummy server.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I do see a decent amount of activity on it. Full disclaimer, I am not a security expert. I know just enough to be dangerous. But, I see at least a few connection attempts from different IPs about every day. The top 3 countries of origin are China, Russia, and Brazil (based on the reverse DNS, but it's possible some are using VPNs to hide their origin). My impression is they're all bots that just go through a list of IP addresses, attempting to connect to the standard ssh port, then guessing the username and password. What I've found is they usually go through a list of likely ssh ports until one of them connects. Having the default port open to only the honeypot means they usually establish the connection, then leave it at that, so my real ssh port never gets hit. I kinda think of it like scambaiting, where I'm just wasting time they might otherwise spend trying to break into someone else's real ssh server.