Selfhosted

That was a great answer, thank you so much!

Yes I didnt even notice the family photos and docs dont need to be on that same server. Initially I just put them there to act as a local file share. But you are absolutely right, moving them from the public server is the best thing I can do to protect them.

I will look into setting up a second server for the private stuff that is not publicluly accessible

Your photo and docs

At least in my case, it's really handy to share photos with other family members. But certainly you don't need all of them available on the same public service.

To be even more explicit on the last point, that means regularly updating OpenWRT and all your containers, not just the server's base OS

Thanks for your reply!

Suggestion 1 definetely does make a lot of sense and I will be doing exactly that asap. Its something I didnt think through before but that would make me much more in peace.

Suggestions 2-4 sound very reasonable, I have indeed searched for a way to self host a waf but didnt find much info. My only only concern with your points is... Cloudflare. From my understanding that would indeed add a lot of security to the whole setup but they would then be able to see everything going through my network, is that right?

Sounds exactly like my setup for the last 5 years, minus NGINX (don't need it with Cloidflared since each service is it's own Proxmos Container and use their own exclusive tunnels).

Thanks for the amazing reply and specially for the explanation regarding wireguard.

I didnt know about crowsec and kata containers, both amazing projects, I will definetely look into it and try to set them up.

Just one quick follow up question, when you mention dedicanted service user, do you mean its best to have a sepate user for each service, such as one for nginx, one for adguardhome and so on? Currently all of them run under the same user and I didnt think about this possibility before.

mTLS is great and it's a shame Firefox mobile still doesn't support it.

Wow, thats very, very nice. I didnt know this even existed.

But I suppose if it had widespread support it would be the perfect solution.

Firefox mobile not supporting it might be a dealbreaker though, since it is the browser I use and the one I persuaded all my friends and family to switch to...

But this is an incredibly interesting technology and I will surely look into implementing at least partially if that works.

Thanks a lot for sharing!

Sounds like the clearnet equivalent to i2p encrypted lease sets

Minimum open services is indeed best practice but be careful about making statements that the attack surface is relegated to open inbound ports.

Even Enterprise gear gets hit every now and then with a vulnerability that's able to bypass closed port blocking from the outside. Cisco had some nasty ones where you could DDOS a firewall to the point the rules engine would let things through. It's rare but things like that do happen.

You can also have vulnerabilities with clients/services inside your network. Somebody gets someone in your family to click on something or someone slips a mickey inside one of your container updates, all of a sudden you have a rat on the inside. Hell even baby monitors are a liability these days.

I wish all the home hardware was better at zero trust. Keeping crap in isolation networks and setting up firewalls between your garden and your clients can either be prudent or overkill depending on your situation. Personally I think it's best for stuff that touches the web to only be allowed a minimum amount of network access to internal devices. Keep that Plex server isolated from your document store if you can.

Counter question

How would you know something went wrong? Do you monitor all the logs? Do you have alerting?

What happens if one service has a serious vulnerability and is compromised? Would an adversary be able to do lateral movement? For that matter are you scanning/checking for vulnerabilities? Do you monitor security tracker?

All of these are things to consider

Yeah, a company got toasted because one of their admins was running Plex and had tautulli installed and opened to the outside figuring it was read-only and safe.

Zero day bug in tat exposed his Plex token. They then used another vulnerability in Plex to remote code execute. He was self-hosting a GitHub copy of all the company's code.

Id like to know as well. I definetely dont want to be the first person of that story tough

Ive heard of someone who exposed the docker management port on the internet and woke up to malware running on their server. But thats of course not the same as web services.

Been there, done that lol, my ISP doesnt change my IP half as much as I should like, and I renew my certs half as often as they deserve.

Seriously though, I had certs expire twice until I finally decided to get this setup properly.

Get a VPS and route traffic into a isolated network

Thanks for replying!

I do use dns challanges for renewing my certs. But I use port 443 for application data, not for certs.

Is a vpn always safer then a reverse proxy? Do you use wireguard or do you have any other options worth looking into?

Thanks a lot for your input. I honestly had not considered this possibility.

Others in the post recommended removing those important files from the public facing server so that in the case of an attack they wouldnt be exposed. So I will try and follow this recommendation asap.

But your answer still applies to everything else I will be hosting so I am concerned. I had no idea ransomware was this smart. I will research more about this topic, but basically if I access a file from two different servers and its fine it means the file is free from infection?

During that time, your data is encrypted but you don't know because when you open a file, your computer decrypts it and shows you what you expect to see.

First time i hear of that. You sure? Would be really risky since you basically need to hijack the complete Filesystem communication to do that. Also for that to work you would need the private and public key of the encryption on the system on run time. Really risky and unlikely that this is the case imho.