Selfhosted

39435 readers

1 users here now

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.

Rules:

Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Just how secure are the various reverse proxy options? (feddit.uk)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Specifically from the standpoint of protecting against common and not-so-common exploits.

I understand the concept of a reverse proxy and how works on the surface level, but do any of the common recommendations (npm, caddy, traefik) actually do anything worthwhile to protect against exploit probes and/or active attacks?

Npm has a "block common exploits" option but I can't find anything about what that actually does, caddy has a module to add crowdsec support which looks like it could be promising but I haven't wrapped my head around it yet, and traefik looks like a massive pain to get going in the first place!

Meanwhile Bunkerweb actually looks like it's been built with robust protections out of the box, but seems like it's just as complicated as traefik to setup, and DNS based Let's Encrypt requires a pro subscription so that's a no-go for me anyway.

Would love to hear people's thoughts on the matter and what you're doing to adequately secure your setup.

Edit: Thanks for all of your informative replies, everyone. I read them all and replied to as many as I could! In the end I've managed to get npm working with crowdsec, and once I get cloudflare to include the source IP with the requests I think I'll be happy enough with that solution.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

What you probably want is a dmz or red/green localnets. A reverse proxy (as others have mentioned) like haproxy or nginx) are extremely unlikely to, themselves, be hacked. But they don't really add security, either.

What does add security is to have a router with a firewall, with one or more red networks, and a green network.

The red network has all of your public-facing servers. They have virtually no external access, and no internal access except to respond. It's even good to have a rule on the router that you can turn on/off that blocks all outbound connections from the red network to the external world. To upgrade a server, turn off the rule, upgrade, and then turn the rule on again. The router only forwards inbound connections from the internet on a specific port, and routes them to the server/servers on the red network(s) on a (possibly different) specific port.

Most ownage-style hacks involve (once compromised) either calling home (can't if the server is not allowed outbound connections) or opening an additional port (who cares, the router will never forward anything to that port).

Then, back up your important info, and keep multiple copies of that info - daily for a week, monthly for a few months, and yearly.