I’m trying to better understand hosting a Lemmy Instance. Lurking discussions it seems like some people are hosting from the Cloud or VPS. My understanding is that it’s better to futureproof by running your own home server so that you have the data and the top most control of hardware, software etc. My understanding is that by hosting an instance via Cloud or VPS you are offloading the data / information to a 3rd party.
Are people actually running their own actual self-hosted servers from home? Do you have any recommended guides on running a Lemmy Instance?
I don’t know about the history of selfhosted, I use a vps at hetzner which serves as playground and I use a mini desktop (hp elitedesk) as my home automation lab.
This community is an inspiration on spotting new techniques and software to discover!
I have a salvaged HP 3500 Pro with an HTPC case and 8.5 TB storage. Started mainly for Jellyfin and now have half a dozen docker containers on it. Great test bed for getting used to linux before I slowly creep towards having it as my main OS on my PC.
That’s how it started with me. Now I have the arr stack and a bunch of other stuff running. It’s definitely been a fun learning experience. It’s a lot nicer just giving the wife a jellyseerr icon on her phone instead of her giving me a long list of stuff she wants and I have to find them.
Me, yes. But it’s still selfhosting if you do it on a VPS. And probably easier, too. I mainly do it at home, because I can have multiple large harddisks this way. And storage is kind of expensive in the cloud.
Depending on where you are, a hard drive that runs 24/7 can cost you quite a bit of money (6$/month or even more for just the hard drive). If you consider the upfront cost of a hard drive, the benefit of hosting at home gets even smaller. Nvme is where you really save money hosting at home.
Personally I do both, because cloud is cheap and you can have crazy bandwiths.
I know. You pretty much need to know what you’re doing. And do the maths. Know the reliability (MTBF/MTTF) and price. Don’t forget to multiply it by two (as I forgot) because you want backups. And factor in cost of operation. And corresponding hardware you need to run to operate those hdds. My hdd spins down after 5 minutes. I live in Europe and really get to pay for electricity as a consumer. A data center pays way less. My main data, mail, calendar and contacts, OS, databases and everything that needs to be there 24/7 fits on a 1TB solid state disk that doesn’t need much energy while idle. So the hdd is mostly spun down.
Nonetheless, I have a 10TB hdd in the basement. I think it was a bit less than 300€ back when I bought it a few years ago. But I can be mistaken. I pay about 0.34€/kWh for (green) electricity. But the server only uses less than 20W on average. That makes it about 4€ per month in electricity for me. And I think my homeserver cost me about 1000€ and I’ve had it since 2017. So that would be another ~15€ per month if I say I buy hardware for ~1100€ every 6 years. Let’s say I pay about 20€/month for the whole thing. I’m not going to factor in the internet connection, because I need that anyways. (And I probably forgot to factor in I upgraded the SSD 2 times and bought additional RAM when it got super cheap. And I don’t know the reliability of my hdds…)
I also have a cheap VPS and they’d want 76,27€/month … 915.24€ per year if I was to buy 10TB of storage from them. (But I think there are cheaper providers out there.) That would have me protected against hard disk failures. It’ll probably get cheaper with time, I can scale that effortlessly and the harddisks are spun up 24/7. The harddisks are faster ones and their internet connection is also way faster. And I can’t make mistakes like with my own hardware. Maybe having a hdd fail early or buy hardware that needs excessive power. And that’d ruin my calculation… In my case… I’m going with my ~20€/month. And I hope I did the maths correctly. Best bang for the buck is probably: Dont have the data 24/7 available and just buy an external 10TB hard drive if your concern is just pirating movies. Plug it in via USB into whatever device you’re using. And make sure to have backups ;) And if you don’t need vast amounts of space, and want to host a proper service for other people: just pay for a VPS somewhere.
You forgot something in your calculations, you don’t need a complete VPS for the *arrs. App hosting/seedboxes are enough for that and you can have them for very, very cheap.
Ahem, I don’t need a seedbox at all. I use my VPS to host Jitsi-Meet, PeerTube and a few experiments. The *arrs are for the people over at !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Selfhosting is the act of hosting applications on “hardware you control”. That could be rented or owned, its the same to us. You could go out and buy a server to host your applications but there a few issues that you might run into that could prevent you from simply standing up a server rack in your spare room. From shitty ISPs to lack of hardware knowledge there are plenty of reasons to just rent a VPS. Either way youre one of us :)
You control the hardware you are provisioned and the software you run on it, which is enough for me. Unless you’re looking for a job in the server adminstration/maintenance field the physical hardware access component of it matters less IMO
Some of them offer what they call bare metal provisioning and I wonder if some even offer ILOM type access. That’s pretty much control of the hardware for me. Just that you can’t plug in a disk or a memory stick.
“Self-hosted” means you are in control of the platform. That doesn’t mean you have to own the platform outright, just that you hold the keys.
Using a VPS to build a Nextcloud server vs using Google Drive is like the difference between leasing a car and taking a taxi. Yes, you don’t technically own the car like you would if you bought it outright, but that difference is mostly academic. The fact is you’re still in the driver’s seat, controlling how everything works. You get to drive where you want to, in your own time, you pick the music, you set the AC, you adjust the seats, and you can store as much stuff in the trunk as you want, for as long as you want.
As long as you’re the person behind the metaphorical wheel, it’s still self-hosting.
I’m sure the original spirit of selfhosting is actually owning the hardware (whether enterprise- or consumer-grade) but depending on your situation, renting a server could be more stable or cost effective. Whether you own the hardware or not, we all (more or less) have shared experiences anyway.
Where I live, there are some seasons wherein the weather could be pretty bad and internet or electricity outages can happen. I wouldn’t mind hours or even days of downtime for a service whose users are only myself or a few other people (i.e. non-critical services) like a private Jellyfin server, a Discord bot, or a game server.
For a public Lemmy server, I’d rather host it on the cloud where the hardware is located in a datacenter and I pay for other people to manage whatever disasters that could happen. As long as I make regular backups, I’m free to move elsewhere if I’m not satisfied with their service.
As far as costs go, it might be cheaper to rent VMs if you don’t need a whole lot of performance. If you need something like a dedicated GPU, then renting becomes much more expensive. Also consider your own electricity costs and internet bills and whether you’re under NAT or not. You might need to use Cloudflare tunnels or rent a VPS as a proxy to expose your homeserver to the rest of the world.
If the concern is just data privacy and security, then honestly, I have no idea. I know it’s common practice to encrypt your backups but I don’t know if the Lemmy database is encrypted itself or something. I’m a total idiot when it comes to these so hopefully someone can chime in and explain to us :D
For Lemmy hosting guides, I wrote one which you can find here but it’s pretty outdated by now. I’ve moved to rootless Docker for example. The Lemmy docs were awful at the time so I made some modifications based on past experiences with selfhosting. If you’re struggling with their recommended way of installing it, you can use my guide as reference or just ask around in this community. There’s a lot of friendly people who can help!
Certain cloud providers are as secure, if not more secure, than a home lab. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, et al. are responding to 0-day vulnerabilities on the reg. In a home lab, that is on you.
To me, self-hosted means you deploy, operate, and maintain your services.
Why? Varied…the most crucial reason is 1) it is fun because 2) they work.
Listing Microsoft cloud after their recent certificate mess is an interesting choice.
Also, the “cloud responds to vulnerability” only works if you’re paying them to host the services for you - which definitely no longer is self hosting. If you bring up your own services the patching is on you, no matter where they are.
If you care about stuff like “have some stuff encrypted with the keys in a hardware module” own hardware is your only option. If you don’t care about that you still need to be aware that “cloud” or “VPS” still means that you’re sharing hardware with third parties - which comes with potential security issues.
Well with bare metal yes, but when your architecture is virtual, configuration rises in importance as the first line of defense. So it’s not just “yum —update” and reboot to remediate a vulnerability, there is more to it; the odds of a home lab admin keeping up with that seem remote to me.
Encryption is interesting, there really is no practical difference between cloud vs self hosted encryption offerings other than an emotional response.
Regarding security issues, it will depend on the provider but one wonders if those are real or imagined issues?
Well with bare metal yes, but when your architecture is virtual, configuration rises in importance as the first line of defense
You’ll have all the virtualization management functions in a separate, properly secured management VLAN with limited access. So the exposed attack surface (unless you’re selling VM containers) is pretty much the same as on bare metal: Somebody would need to exploit application or OS issues, and then in a second stage break out of the virtualization. This has the potential to cause more damage than small applications on bare metal - and if you don’t have fail over the impact of rebooting the underlying system after applying patches is more severe.
On the other hand, already for many years - and way before container stuff was mature - hardware was too powerful for just running a single application, so it was common to have lots of unrelated stuff there, which is a maintenance nightmare. Just having that split up into lots of containers probably brings more security enhancements than the risk of having to patch your container runtime.
Encryption is interesting, there really is no practical difference between cloud vs self hosted encryption offerings other than an emotional response.
Most of the encryption features advertised for cloud are marketing bullshit.
“Homomorphic encryption” as a concept just screams “side channel attacks” - and indeed as soon as a team properly looked at it they published a side channel paper.
For pretty much all the technologies advertised from both AMD and intel to solve the various problems of trying to make people trust untrustworthy infrastructure with their private keys sidechannel attacks or other vulnerabilities exist.
As soon as you upload a private key into a cloud system you lost control over it, no matter what their marketing department will tell you. Self hosted you can properly secure your keys in audited hardware storage, preventing key extraction.
Regarding security issues, it will depend on the provider but one wonders if those are real or imagined issues?
Just look at the Microsoft certificate issue I’ve mentioned - data was compromised because of that, they tried to deny the claim, and it was only possible to show that the problem exists because some US agencies paid extra for receiving error logs. Microsofts solution to keep you calm? “Just pay extra as well so you can also audit our logs to see if we lose another key”
The azure breach is interesting in that it is vs MSFT SaaS. We’re talking produce, ready to eat meals are in the deli section!
The encryption tech in many cloud providers is typically superior to what you run at home to the point I don’t believe it is a common attack vector.
Overall, hardened containers are more secure vs bare metal as the attack vectors are radically diff.
A container should refuse to execute processes that have nothing to do with container function. For ex, there is no reason to have a super user in a container, and the underlying container host should never be accessible from the devices connecting to the containers that it hosts.
Bare metal is an emotional illusion of control esp with consumer devices between ISP gateway and bare metal.
It’s not that self hosted can’t run the same level of detect & reject cfg, it’s just that I would be surprised if it was. Securing self hosted internet facing home labs could almost be its own community and is definitely worth a discussion.
My point is that it is simpler imo to button up a virtual env and that includes a virtual network env (by defn, cloud hosting).
The encryption tech in many cloud providers is typically superior to what you run at home to the point I don’t believe it is a common attack vector.
They rely on hardware functionality in Epyc or Xeon CPUs for their stuff - I have the same hardware at home, and don’t use that functionality as it has massive problems. What I do have at home is smartcard based key storage for all my private keys - keys can’t be extracted from there, and the only outside copy is a passphrase encrypted based64 printout on paper in a sealed envelope in a safe place. Cloud operators will tell you they can also do the equivalent - but they’re lying about that.
And the homomorphic encryption thing they’re trying to sell is just stupid.
Overall, hardened containers are more secure vs bare metal as the attack vectors are radically diff.
Assuming you put the same single application on bare metal the attack vectors are pretty much the same - but anybody sensible stopped doing that over a decade ago as hardware became just too powerful to justify that. So I assume nowadays anything hosted at home involves some form of container runtime or virtualization (or if not whoever is running it should reconsider their life choices).
My point is that it is simpler imo to button up a virtual env and that includes a virtual network env
Just like the container thing above, pretty much any deployment nowadays (even just simple low powered systems coming close to the old bare metal days) will contain at least some level of virtual networking. Traditionally we were binding everything to either localhost or world, and then going from there - but nowadays even for a simple setup it’s way more sensible to have only something like a nginx container with a public IP, and all services isolated in separate containers with various host only network bridges.
I like how you have a home smartcard. I can’t believe many do.
Pretty much anyone should do. There’s no excuse to at least keep your personal PGP keys in some USB dongle. I personally wouldn’t recommend yubikey for various reasons, but there are a lot more options nowadays. Most of those vendors also now have HSM options which are reasonably priced and scale well enough for small hosting purposes.
I started a long time ago with empty smartcards and a custom card applet - back then it was quite complicated to find empty smartcards as a private customer. By now I’ve also switched to readily available modules.
Why do you think cloud operators are lying?
One of the key concepts of the cloud is that your VMs are not tied to physical hardware. Which in turn means the key storage also isn’t - which means extraction of keys is possible. Now they’ll tell you some nonsense how they utilize cryptography to make it secure - but you can’t beat “key extraction is not possible at all”.
For the other bits I’ve mentioned a few times side channel attacks. Then there’s AMDs encrypted memory (SEV) claiming to fully isolate VMs from each other, with multiple published attacks. And we have AMDs PSP and intels ME, both with multiple published attacks. I think there also was a published attack against the key storage I described above, but I don’t remember the name.
I agree that our stuff is unlikely to be victim of an targeted attack in the cloud - but could be impacted by a targeted attack on something sharing bare metal with you. Or somebody just managed to perfect one of the currently possible attacks to run them larger scale for data collection - in all cases you’re unlikely to be properly informed about the data loss.
Hey, I love this thread, and I am intrigued by the term "futureproof"ing. can someone direct me to a thread where local networks are self-hosted and the human element of organizing the network is discussed? Thank you. If I don’t come back, it’s because I’m new to Lemmyworld and got lost.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !selfhosted@lemmy.world
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.
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I don’t know about the history of selfhosted, I use a vps at hetzner which serves as playground and I use a mini desktop (hp elitedesk) as my home automation lab.
This community is an inspiration on spotting new techniques and software to discover!
I have a salvaged HP 3500 Pro with an HTPC case and 8.5 TB storage. Started mainly for Jellyfin and now have half a dozen docker containers on it. Great test bed for getting used to linux before I slowly creep towards having it as my main OS on my PC.
I’m starting to realize that jellyfin is a gateway drug to self-hosting. And I’m here for it.
Me: I got a small plex server going to save money compared to steaming…
Narrator: He did not.
That’s how it started with me. Now I have the arr stack and a bunch of other stuff running. It’s definitely been a fun learning experience. It’s a lot nicer just giving the wife a jellyseerr icon on her phone instead of her giving me a long list of stuff she wants and I have to find them.
I have servers at home but I don’t host services
I do the same. I have probably 20 VMs on my home lan. Then I have about 4 servers with various providers.
Me, yes. But it’s still selfhosting if you do it on a VPS. And probably easier, too. I mainly do it at home, because I can have multiple large harddisks this way. And storage is kind of expensive in the cloud.
Depending on where you are, a hard drive that runs 24/7 can cost you quite a bit of money (6$/month or even more for just the hard drive). If you consider the upfront cost of a hard drive, the benefit of hosting at home gets even smaller. Nvme is where you really save money hosting at home. Personally I do both, because cloud is cheap and you can have crazy bandwiths.
I know. You pretty much need to know what you’re doing. And do the maths. Know the reliability (MTBF/MTTF) and price. Don’t forget to multiply it by two (as I forgot) because you want backups. And factor in cost of operation. And corresponding hardware you need to run to operate those hdds. My hdd spins down after 5 minutes. I live in Europe and really get to pay for electricity as a consumer. A data center pays way less. My main data, mail, calendar and contacts, OS, databases and everything that needs to be there 24/7 fits on a 1TB solid state disk that doesn’t need much energy while idle. So the hdd is mostly spun down.
Nonetheless, I have a 10TB hdd in the basement. I think it was a bit less than 300€ back when I bought it a few years ago. But I can be mistaken. I pay about 0.34€/kWh for (green) electricity. But the server only uses less than 20W on average. That makes it about 4€ per month in electricity for me. And I think my homeserver cost me about 1000€ and I’ve had it since 2017. So that would be another ~15€ per month if I say I buy hardware for ~1100€ every 6 years. Let’s say I pay about 20€/month for the whole thing. I’m not going to factor in the internet connection, because I need that anyways. (And I probably forgot to factor in I upgraded the SSD 2 times and bought additional RAM when it got super cheap. And I don’t know the reliability of my hdds…)
I also have a cheap VPS and they’d want 76,27€/month … 915.24€ per year if I was to buy 10TB of storage from them. (But I think there are cheaper providers out there.) That would have me protected against hard disk failures. It’ll probably get cheaper with time, I can scale that effortlessly and the harddisks are spun up 24/7. The harddisks are faster ones and their internet connection is also way faster. And I can’t make mistakes like with my own hardware. Maybe having a hdd fail early or buy hardware that needs excessive power. And that’d ruin my calculation… In my case… I’m going with my ~20€/month. And I hope I did the maths correctly. Best bang for the buck is probably: Dont have the data 24/7 available and just buy an external 10TB hard drive if your concern is just pirating movies. Plug it in via USB into whatever device you’re using. And make sure to have backups ;) And if you don’t need vast amounts of space, and want to host a proper service for other people: just pay for a VPS somewhere.
You forgot something in your calculations, you don’t need a complete VPS for the *arrs. App hosting/seedboxes are enough for that and you can have them for very, very cheap.
Ahem, I don’t need a seedbox at all. I use my VPS to host Jitsi-Meet, PeerTube and a few experiments. The *arrs are for the people over at !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
That you probably need a VPS for, yes.
Selfhosting is the act of hosting applications on “hardware you control”. That could be rented or owned, its the same to us. You could go out and buy a server to host your applications but there a few issues that you might run into that could prevent you from simply standing up a server rack in your spare room. From shitty ISPs to lack of hardware knowledge there are plenty of reasons to just rent a VPS. Either way youre one of us :)
But you don’t control the hardware if you run it on a VPS?
If your server has IPMI, there’s little difference between being there in person and not.
You control the hardware you are provisioned and the software you run on it, which is enough for me. Unless you’re looking for a job in the server adminstration/maintenance field the physical hardware access component of it matters less IMO
You definitely don’t control the hardware. Someone else at some remote server farm or something does.
Some of them offer what they call bare metal provisioning and I wonder if some even offer ILOM type access. That’s pretty much control of the hardware for me. Just that you can’t plug in a disk or a memory stick.
at least i do have 2 servers. one main and one backup
“Self-hosted” means you are in control of the platform. That doesn’t mean you have to own the platform outright, just that you hold the keys.
Using a VPS to build a Nextcloud server vs using Google Drive is like the difference between leasing a car and taking a taxi. Yes, you don’t technically own the car like you would if you bought it outright, but that difference is mostly academic. The fact is you’re still in the driver’s seat, controlling how everything works. You get to drive where you want to, in your own time, you pick the music, you set the AC, you adjust the seats, and you can store as much stuff in the trunk as you want, for as long as you want.
As long as you’re the person behind the metaphorical wheel, it’s still self-hosting.
I pay Dreamhost for a beef pc VPS, that’s what “selfhosted” means to me. I host all kinds of shit on it.
What kinda beef are we talking here?
500 GB SSD / 16 GB RAM / 8 vCPUs you won’t go hungry
For me it does. I’m sure some other people use a VPS or something and self host using a cloud provider of some kind.
I’m sure the original spirit of selfhosting is actually owning the hardware (whether enterprise- or consumer-grade) but depending on your situation, renting a server could be more stable or cost effective. Whether you own the hardware or not, we all (more or less) have shared experiences anyway.
Where I live, there are some seasons wherein the weather could be pretty bad and internet or electricity outages can happen. I wouldn’t mind hours or even days of downtime for a service whose users are only myself or a few other people (i.e. non-critical services) like a private Jellyfin server, a Discord bot, or a game server.
For a public Lemmy server, I’d rather host it on the cloud where the hardware is located in a datacenter and I pay for other people to manage whatever disasters that could happen. As long as I make regular backups, I’m free to move elsewhere if I’m not satisfied with their service.
As far as costs go, it might be cheaper to rent VMs if you don’t need a whole lot of performance. If you need something like a dedicated GPU, then renting becomes much more expensive. Also consider your own electricity costs and internet bills and whether you’re under NAT or not. You might need to use Cloudflare tunnels or rent a VPS as a proxy to expose your homeserver to the rest of the world.
If the concern is just data privacy and security, then honestly, I have no idea. I know it’s common practice to encrypt your backups but I don’t know if the Lemmy database is encrypted itself or something. I’m a total idiot when it comes to these so hopefully someone can chime in and explain to us :D
For Lemmy hosting guides, I wrote one which you can find here but it’s pretty outdated by now. I’ve moved to rootless Docker for example. The Lemmy docs were awful at the time so I made some modifications based on past experiences with selfhosting. If you’re struggling with their recommended way of installing it, you can use my guide as reference or just ask around in this community. There’s a lot of friendly people who can help!
For me, since you can get kicked off a platform eg hetzner vps, it’s not self hosted, they’re hosting you.
Yep, big ol’ case under my desk with some 20TB of storage space.
Most of what I host is piracy related 👀
how much of the 20tb is used?
There’s about 3.5 TB to go out of an actual 18 in the server.
I have another 2TB to install but it’s not in yet.
I’m also transcoding a lot of my media library to x265 to save space.
I don’t download for the sake of downloading, usually, and i delete stuff if I don’t see value in keeping it.
What is a good transcoder? I haven’t ran my media through one. Is the space saving significant? Did you lose video quality?
In order:
FFMPEG, yes, no.
I refer you to this comment for more info.
I have seen a saving of 60-80% per file on lower resolutions like 720 or 1080, which makes the server time well worth it.
A folder of 26 files totaling 61GB went down to 10.5, for example.
Free space is wasted space
~19.5 tb of hardcore midget porn
~500 gigs of whale sounds to help me sleep
Whale sounds! Oh man, I’m gonna add that to ELF space radio and rain recordings!
Whoops that was backwards, my bad
~19.5 tb of hardcore whale porn
~500 gigs of midget sounds to help me sleep
Certain cloud providers are as secure, if not more secure, than a home lab. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, et al. are responding to 0-day vulnerabilities on the reg. In a home lab, that is on you.
To me, self-hosted means you deploy, operate, and maintain your services.
Why? Varied…the most crucial reason is 1) it is fun because 2) they work.
I mean, as long as you patch regularly and keep backups, you should be good enough. That’s most of what responding to a zero day is, anyway, patching.
Listing Microsoft cloud after their recent certificate mess is an interesting choice.
Also, the “cloud responds to vulnerability” only works if you’re paying them to host the services for you - which definitely no longer is self hosting. If you bring up your own services the patching is on you, no matter where they are.
If you care about stuff like “have some stuff encrypted with the keys in a hardware module” own hardware is your only option. If you don’t care about that you still need to be aware that “cloud” or “VPS” still means that you’re sharing hardware with third parties - which comes with potential security issues.
Well with bare metal yes, but when your architecture is virtual, configuration rises in importance as the first line of defense. So it’s not just “yum —update” and reboot to remediate a vulnerability, there is more to it; the odds of a home lab admin keeping up with that seem remote to me.
Encryption is interesting, there really is no practical difference between cloud vs self hosted encryption offerings other than an emotional response.
Regarding security issues, it will depend on the provider but one wonders if those are real or imagined issues?
You’ll have all the virtualization management functions in a separate, properly secured management VLAN with limited access. So the exposed attack surface (unless you’re selling VM containers) is pretty much the same as on bare metal: Somebody would need to exploit application or OS issues, and then in a second stage break out of the virtualization. This has the potential to cause more damage than small applications on bare metal - and if you don’t have fail over the impact of rebooting the underlying system after applying patches is more severe.
On the other hand, already for many years - and way before container stuff was mature - hardware was too powerful for just running a single application, so it was common to have lots of unrelated stuff there, which is a maintenance nightmare. Just having that split up into lots of containers probably brings more security enhancements than the risk of having to patch your container runtime.
Most of the encryption features advertised for cloud are marketing bullshit.
“Homomorphic encryption” as a concept just screams “side channel attacks” - and indeed as soon as a team properly looked at it they published a side channel paper.
For pretty much all the technologies advertised from both AMD and intel to solve the various problems of trying to make people trust untrustworthy infrastructure with their private keys sidechannel attacks or other vulnerabilities exist.
As soon as you upload a private key into a cloud system you lost control over it, no matter what their marketing department will tell you. Self hosted you can properly secure your keys in audited hardware storage, preventing key extraction.
Just look at the Microsoft certificate issue I’ve mentioned - data was compromised because of that, they tried to deny the claim, and it was only possible to show that the problem exists because some US agencies paid extra for receiving error logs. Microsofts solution to keep you calm? “Just pay extra as well so you can also audit our logs to see if we lose another key”
The azure breach is interesting in that it is vs MSFT SaaS. We’re talking produce, ready to eat meals are in the deli section!
The encryption tech in many cloud providers is typically superior to what you run at home to the point I don’t believe it is a common attack vector.
Overall, hardened containers are more secure vs bare metal as the attack vectors are radically diff.
A container should refuse to execute processes that have nothing to do with container function. For ex, there is no reason to have a super user in a container, and the underlying container host should never be accessible from the devices connecting to the containers that it hosts.
Bare metal is an emotional illusion of control esp with consumer devices between ISP gateway and bare metal.
It’s not that self hosted can’t run the same level of detect & reject cfg, it’s just that I would be surprised if it was. Securing self hosted internet facing home labs could almost be its own community and is definitely worth a discussion.
My point is that it is simpler imo to button up a virtual env and that includes a virtual network env (by defn, cloud hosting).
They rely on hardware functionality in Epyc or Xeon CPUs for their stuff - I have the same hardware at home, and don’t use that functionality as it has massive problems. What I do have at home is smartcard based key storage for all my private keys - keys can’t be extracted from there, and the only outside copy is a passphrase encrypted based64 printout on paper in a sealed envelope in a safe place. Cloud operators will tell you they can also do the equivalent - but they’re lying about that.
And the homomorphic encryption thing they’re trying to sell is just stupid.
Assuming you put the same single application on bare metal the attack vectors are pretty much the same - but anybody sensible stopped doing that over a decade ago as hardware became just too powerful to justify that. So I assume nowadays anything hosted at home involves some form of container runtime or virtualization (or if not whoever is running it should reconsider their life choices).
Just like the container thing above, pretty much any deployment nowadays (even just simple low powered systems coming close to the old bare metal days) will contain at least some level of virtual networking. Traditionally we were binding everything to either localhost or world, and then going from there - but nowadays even for a simple setup it’s way more sensible to have only something like a nginx container with a public IP, and all services isolated in separate containers with various host only network bridges.
I like how you have a home smartcard. I can’t believe many do.
Why do you think cloud operators are lying?
Pretty much anyone should do. There’s no excuse to at least keep your personal PGP keys in some USB dongle. I personally wouldn’t recommend yubikey for various reasons, but there are a lot more options nowadays. Most of those vendors also now have HSM options which are reasonably priced and scale well enough for small hosting purposes.
I started a long time ago with empty smartcards and a custom card applet - back then it was quite complicated to find empty smartcards as a private customer. By now I’ve also switched to readily available modules.
One of the key concepts of the cloud is that your VMs are not tied to physical hardware. Which in turn means the key storage also isn’t - which means extraction of keys is possible. Now they’ll tell you some nonsense how they utilize cryptography to make it secure - but you can’t beat “key extraction is not possible at all”.
For the other bits I’ve mentioned a few times side channel attacks. Then there’s AMDs encrypted memory (SEV) claiming to fully isolate VMs from each other, with multiple published attacks. And we have AMDs PSP and intels ME, both with multiple published attacks. I think there also was a published attack against the key storage I described above, but I don’t remember the name.
I agree that our stuff is unlikely to be victim of an targeted attack in the cloud - but could be impacted by a targeted attack on something sharing bare metal with you. Or somebody just managed to perfect one of the currently possible attacks to run them larger scale for data collection - in all cases you’re unlikely to be properly informed about the data loss.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
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Hey, I love this thread, and I am intrigued by the term "futureproof"ing. can someone direct me to a thread where local networks are self-hosted and the human element of organizing the network is discussed? Thank you. If I don’t come back, it’s because I’m new to Lemmyworld and got lost.