Mid 2022, a friend of mine helped me set up a selfhosted Vaultwarden instance. Since then, my “infrastructure” has not stopped growing, and I’ve been learning each and every day about how services work, how they communicate and how I can move data from one place to another. It’s truly incredible, and my favorite hobby by a long shot.
Here’s a map of what I’ve built so far. Right now, I’m mostly done, but surely time will bring more ideas. I’ve also left out a bunch of “technically revelant” connections like DNS resolution through the AdGuard instance, firewalls and CrowdSec on the main VPS.
Looking at the setups that others have posted, I don’t think this is super incredible - but if you have input or questions about the setup, I’ll do my best to explain it all. None of my peers really understand what it takes to construct something like this, so I am in need of people who understand my excitement and proudness :)
bots all over the net will find any openly exposed ports in no time and start attacking it blindly,
True.
putting strain on your router
I guess? Not more than it can handle mind. But sure there will be a bit of traffic. But this is also kinda true whether you expose ports or not. The scanning is relentless.
and a general risk into your home network.
Well…If your proxy forwards traffic to your home network you’re still effectively exposing your home network to the internt. There’s just a hop in between. Scans that attack the web applications mostly don’t know or care about your proxy. If I hacked a service through the proxy I still gain access to your home network.
That said, having crowdstrike add a layer of protection here is a good thing to potentially catch something you didn’t know about (eg a forgotten default admin password). But having it on a different network over a vpn doesn’t seem to add any value here?
You make a good point. But I still find that directly exposing a port on my home network feels more dangerous than doing so on a remote server. I want to prevent attackers sidestepping the proxy and directly accessing the server itself, which feels more likely to allow circumventing the isolations provided by docker in case of a breach.
Judging from a couple articles I read online, if i wanted to publicly expose a port on my home network, I should also isolate the public server from the rest of the local LAN with a VLAN. For which I’d need to first replace my router, and learn a whole lot more about networking. Doing it this way, which is basically a homemade cloudflare tunnel, lets me rest easier at night.
You make a good point. But I still find that directly exposing a port on my home network feels more dangerous than doing so on a remote server.
You do what makes you feel comfortable, but understand that it’s not a lot safer. It’s not useless though so I wouldn’t say don’t do it. It just feels a bit too much effort for too little gain to me. And maybe isn’t providing the security you think it is.
It’s not “where the port is opened” that matters - it’s “what is exposed to the internet” that matter. When you direct traffic to your home network then your home network is exposed to the internet. Whether though VPN or not.
The proxy server is likely the least vulnerable part of your stack, though I don’t know if “caddy” has a good security reputation. I prefer to use Apache and nginx as they’re tried and true and used by large corporations in production environments for that reason. Your applications are the primary target. Default passwords, vulnerable plugins, known application server vulnerabilities, SQL injections, etc. are what bots are looking for. And your proxy will send those requests whether it’s in a different network or not. That’s where I do like that you have something that will block such “suspect” requests to slow such scanning down.
Your VPS only really makes any sense if you have a firewall in ‘homelab’ that restricts traffic to and from the VPN and specific servers on specific ports. I’m not sure if this is what is indicated by the arrows in and out of the “tailscale” box? Otherwise an attacker with local root on that box will just use your VPN like the proxy does.
So you’re already exposing your applications to the internet. If I compromise your Jellyfin server (through the VPS proxy and VPN) what good is your VPS doing? The first thing an attacker would want to do is setup a bot that reaches out to the internet establishing a back-channel communication direct to your server anyway.
Judging from a couple articles I read online, if i wanted to publicly expose a port on my home network, I should also isolate the public server from the rest of the local LAN with a VLAN.
It’s not “exposing a port that matters” - it’s “providing access to a server.” Which you’ve done. In this case you’re exposing servers on your home network - they’re the targets. So if you want to follow that advice then you should have your servers in a VLAN now.
The reason for separating servers on their own VLAN is to limit the reach an attacker would have should they compromise your server. e.g. so they can’t connect to your other home computers. You would create 2 different networks (e.g. 10.0.10.0/24 and 10.0.20.0/24) and route data between them with a firewall that restricts access. For example 10.0.20.0 can’t connect to 10.0.10.0 but you can connect the other way 'round. That firewall would then stop a compromised server from connecting to systems on the other network (like your laptop, your chromecast, etc.).
I don’t do that because it’s kinda a big bother. It’s certainly better that way, but I think acceptable not to. I wouldn’t die on that hill though.
I want to be careful to say that I’m not saying that anything you’re doing is necessarily wrong or bad. I just don’t want you to misunderstand your security posture.
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True.
I guess? Not more than it can handle mind. But sure there will be a bit of traffic. But this is also kinda true whether you expose ports or not. The scanning is relentless.
Well…If your proxy forwards traffic to your home network you’re still effectively exposing your home network to the internt. There’s just a hop in between. Scans that attack the web applications mostly don’t know or care about your proxy. If I hacked a service through the proxy I still gain access to your home network.
That said, having crowdstrike add a layer of protection here is a good thing to potentially catch something you didn’t know about (eg a forgotten default admin password). But having it on a different network over a vpn doesn’t seem to add any value here?
You make a good point. But I still find that directly exposing a port on my home network feels more dangerous than doing so on a remote server. I want to prevent attackers sidestepping the proxy and directly accessing the server itself, which feels more likely to allow circumventing the isolations provided by docker in case of a breach.
Judging from a couple articles I read online, if i wanted to publicly expose a port on my home network, I should also isolate the public server from the rest of the local LAN with a VLAN. For which I’d need to first replace my router, and learn a whole lot more about networking. Doing it this way, which is basically a homemade cloudflare tunnel, lets me rest easier at night.
You do what makes you feel comfortable, but understand that it’s not a lot safer. It’s not useless though so I wouldn’t say don’t do it. It just feels a bit too much effort for too little gain to me. And maybe isn’t providing the security you think it is.
It’s not “where the port is opened” that matters - it’s “what is exposed to the internet” that matter. When you direct traffic to your home network then your home network is exposed to the internet. Whether though VPN or not.
The proxy server is likely the least vulnerable part of your stack, though I don’t know if “caddy” has a good security reputation. I prefer to use Apache and nginx as they’re tried and true and used by large corporations in production environments for that reason. Your applications are the primary target. Default passwords, vulnerable plugins, known application server vulnerabilities, SQL injections, etc. are what bots are looking for. And your proxy will send those requests whether it’s in a different network or not. That’s where I do like that you have something that will block such “suspect” requests to slow such scanning down.
Your VPS only really makes any sense if you have a firewall in ‘homelab’ that restricts traffic to and from the VPN and specific servers on specific ports. I’m not sure if this is what is indicated by the arrows in and out of the “tailscale” box? Otherwise an attacker with local root on that box will just use your VPN like the proxy does.
So you’re already exposing your applications to the internet. If I compromise your Jellyfin server (through the VPS proxy and VPN) what good is your VPS doing? The first thing an attacker would want to do is setup a bot that reaches out to the internet establishing a back-channel communication direct to your server anyway.
It’s not “exposing a port that matters” - it’s “providing access to a server.” Which you’ve done. In this case you’re exposing servers on your home network - they’re the targets. So if you want to follow that advice then you should have your servers in a VLAN now.
The reason for separating servers on their own VLAN is to limit the reach an attacker would have should they compromise your server. e.g. so they can’t connect to your other home computers. You would create 2 different networks (e.g. 10.0.10.0/24 and 10.0.20.0/24) and route data between them with a firewall that restricts access. For example 10.0.20.0 can’t connect to 10.0.10.0 but you can connect the other way 'round. That firewall would then stop a compromised server from connecting to systems on the other network (like your laptop, your chromecast, etc.).
I don’t do that because it’s kinda a big bother. It’s certainly better that way, but I think acceptable not to. I wouldn’t die on that hill though.
I want to be careful to say that I’m not saying that anything you’re doing is necessarily wrong or bad. I just don’t want you to misunderstand your security posture.