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Are you exposing any ports on your home server?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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I think many of us are using reverse proxies, and opening port 443 (https) and maybe port 80 (http).
Port forwarding can be a recipe for disaster. I'd much rather make use of reverse proxying.
I forward 443 to my reverse proxy.
For lots of things I self host that I wanna expose, I’ll just open a random port like 6952 and then reverse proxy w/ nginx on my web server. Not sure how secure it is, but it works
Ports are probed and scanned constantly so a random port doesn’t make so much difference. I would use a strict firewall with the server IP whitelisted.
Can they see what you are hosting on that port, though? Like say I want to open ssh to my server from the internet (I don't do this and I wouldn't unless it was temporary), but I don't want to open it on port 22 because that's too obvious. Are there bots that just try every protocol until they find one that your server responds to? Or is there a way to dig up information on what is being exposed behind that port?
nmap will try. https://nmap.org/book/man-version-detection.html
Ever since I moved to a ridiculously high port I haven't had any access attempts on my server. 6952 won't do shit, but if you're between 40000 and 65000 you probably won't get anything.
That’s security through obscurity and one should never rely on this strategy alone
If it's your only form of security then it's bad. But if it's on combination with other measures then it's a good thing.
I wouldn't let anyone who hits my ip/port directly into my openvpn. But not having china and russia bomboarding me with requests is nice.
@housepanther @effingjoe Unless you're running a router/firewall on the edge that can act as a reverse proxy, you kind of need to port forward to a reverse proxy if you're behind NAT.
You could use a VPS as a proxy and set up a VPN tunnel between the home server and the VPS to avoid port forwarding altogether. I do this for my mastodon and lemmy instances. My home server is of course behind NAT but there's no need for any kind of port forwarding. I should know because I have none configured.
At that point why don't you just run it in the vps and save the hop.