I run a self-hosted server at home on which I have run a bunch of personal stuff (like nextcloud etc.). To prevent pointing DNS servers at my home router, I run a reverse proxy on a VPS that I rent (from Scaleway FWIW).
Today I was trying to figure to what extent that exposes my data to my VPS provider and whether I can do something about it. Disclaimer: this is just a hobby exercise. I’m not paranoid, I just want to learn for my own self how to improve security of my setup.
My reverse proxy terminates the SSL connection and then proxies the connection over a wireguard connection to my home server. This means that (a) data is decrypted in the RAM of the VPS and (b) the certificates live unencrypted in the storage of the VPS. This means that the VPS provider, if they want to, can read all the traffic unencrypted to and from my home server.
I was thinking that I can solve both problems by using Nginx’s SSL pass-through feature. This would allow me to not terminate SSL on the VPS solving (a) and to move the certificates to my home server solving (b).
But just as I was playing around with it, I realised that SSL pass-through would not solve the problem of trying to protect my data from the VPS provider. As long as my DNS records point at the VPS provider’s servers, the VPS provider can always get their own certificates for my domains and do a MitM attack. Therefore, I might as well keep the certificates on the VPS since I still have to trust them not to make their own behind my back.
In the end I concluded that as long as I use a VPS provider to route my traffic to my home server, there is no fool-proof way to secure my data from them. Intuitively it makes sense, the data crosses their hardware physically and thus they will have access to it. The only way to stop it would be to update the DNS records to point directly at my home server which I don’t want to do.
Is this correct thinking or is there some way to prevent the VPS provider from seeing my data?
Again, I’m trying to solve this problem as a hobby exercise. The most sensitive data that I have is stored encrypted at the filesystem level and I only decrypt it locally on my own machine to work on it. Therefore, the actually sensitive data that would be cost me a lot if compromised is never available unencrypted on the VPS. Due to the overhead of this encryption and other complications, I don’t do this for all my files.
the VPS provider can always get their own certificates for my domains and do a MitM attack.
You can limit which CA’s will offer certificates for your domain with the CAA record in DNS. You can also at least detect if someone else creates a certificate for your domain if you watch the certificate transparency logs.
CAA can also be used to disable http verification, meaning you would have to have control of DNS to be able to get a certificate (which the VPS ideally wouldn’t have).
I didn’t know about that extensions. Thanks for mentioning it. Apparently you can also select which CA account should be the only one allowed to issue certificates for a domain via DNS too.
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You can limit which CA’s will offer certificates for your domain with the CAA record in DNS. You can also at least detect if someone else creates a certificate for your domain if you watch the certificate transparency logs.
CAA can also be used to disable http verification, meaning you would have to have control of DNS to be able to get a certificate (which the VPS ideally wouldn’t have).
I didn’t know about that extensions. Thanks for mentioning it. Apparently you can also select which CA account should be the only one allowed to issue certificates for a domain via DNS too.
Thank you, this is most helpful
Yea, I already have that.
Did not know this before today, but now I have it switched on!