I see a lot of people here uses some form of remote access tool (VPN/Tailscale) to access their home network when not at home. I can’t really do this because my phone (iOS) can only activate one VPN profile at a time, and I often need this for other stuff.
So I chose to expose most web based services on the public internet, behind Authelia. But I don’t know how safe this is.
What I’m really unsure are things like Vaultwarden: while the web interface is protected by Authelia (even use 2FA), its API address needs to be bypassed for direct access, otherwise the mobile APP won’t work. It feels like this is negative everything I’ve done so far.
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I have my nextcloud server exposed, I keep it up to date, patched, etc. but I’d love to use the extra protection of a VPN. Just … I don’t think mobile apps work very well with that, unless I keep my phone constantly connected to the VPN, right? Or is there a smart way to do that?
this thread mentions an OVPN client that can do split tunneling so all you’d do is whitelist your server in the android phone and turn it on.
ProtonVPN has tunneling too, for instance, but no self hosting option.
Yea that’s basically the reason why I can’t use a VPN.
In fact there isn’t really a problem to leave your phone connected to the selfhosted VPN all the time. If split tunneling works properly, only traffic that access your home network would actually go through the VPN, all others will just get bypassed.
But in my case, I already need to be connected to another VPN most of my day, so can’t really go this route.
Is the existing one wireguard? Because on android you can use the same interface and add another peer. You’d also have to use the same ip range and key on your VPN.
I believe you can configure your phone to only route traffic to your server though the VPN.
Nice! … how exactly, I wanna know :)
I’m my case, I’m using the OpenVPN server on my router. When I set it up, there was an option for the client to only use the VPN for local traffic. That way it’s part of the config file on my phone. Works flawlessly
If you don’t need to, then DON’T. I only expose my personal website, my CardDAV server, my Gitea instance and my SSH server. Update them regularly
If your application is insecure/old, use it behind a VPN
I’m a network engineer and >15 years of experience in IT. It’s never “safe”. Not even in corporate IT. You’re a home user and it’s less likely you’ll be targeted but bad actors do comb the internet for known vulnerabilities. Patch your shit, limit exposure, enable MFA on everything. I don’t run it, but I feel slightly sketched out not behind something like a Palo Alto. But again I’m just a small potato in a big sea and I patch everything.
There will always be risk. Just do what feels right for you. Follow beat practices.
I use a reverse proxy and client certificate authentication for anything I expose. That requires me to pre install the client certificate on all of my devices first, but afterwards they can connect freely via a web browser with no further prompting to authenticate. Anybody without the client certificate gets a 403 before they even get past the proxy.
There are limitations to this and overhead of managing a CA and the client certificates for your devices.
It’s only bad practice if you don’t keep up on vulnerabilities/patching, don’t have any type of monitoring or ability to detect a potential breach, etc.
The nice thing about tucking everything behind a VPN is you only have one attack surface to really worry about.
I have many of my services open to the internet, but behind authelia w/2fa and a reverse proxy. I haven’t had a security issue yet, been running this way for a few years.
I think it’s pretty safe as long as you keep them up to date. I run backups weekly and do updates at least once a month.
Using geoip restrictions will also help a lot because you can block most of the scanner bots by denying connections from outside your geographic region. These bots detect what services are open to the internet and then add them to databases like shodan. If a security flaw is found in one of those services, hackers will search those databases for servers with those services running and try to exploit them. If you aren’t in those databases they can’t easily find you before you are able to patch.
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A number of people have touched on the perimeter security, but you can also look at your internal network too and whether you have the systems being exposed on vlans with firewalls preventing connectivity from those systems back to your other stuff that doesn’t need to be exposed. Could help cover you if a system is compromised due to bad config, zero day exploit, or whatever, by limiting the ability to then go sideways through your network to exploit other systems. Depending on what you are hosting there may be zero requirement for your externally facing server to need to talk to the majority of devices on your network, or the talk could be one way only (internal facing to external facing).
