this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Security concerns with locally self hosting publicly accessible app? (lemmygrad.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/selfhosted
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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)

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Best advice is not to expose it publicly.
If you need access outside your LAN try using a VPN to your network with wireguard (wg-easy is nice) or tailscale (there are others as well).

If it's using a domain/subdomain make sure you use secure usernames and passwords, or things like authentik, authelia and the like to buff up security.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What about for services that is made public for anyone to use? VPN would not make sense here

[–] [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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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] 2 points 1 year ago

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

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