this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
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How do you all handle security and monitoring for your publicly accessible services? (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by a_fancy_kiwi@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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This is a continuation of my other post

I now have homeassistant, immich, and authentik docker containers exposed to the open internet. Homeassistant has built in 2FA and authentik is being used as the authentication for immich which supports 2FA. I went ahead and blocked connections from every country except for my own via cloudlfare (I'm aware this does almost nothing but I feel better about it).

At the moment, if my machine became compromised, I wouldn't know. How do I monitor these docker containers? What's a good way to block IPs based on failed login attempts? Is there a tool that could alert me if my machine was compromised? Any recommendations?

EDIT: Oh, and if you have any recommendations for settings I should change in the cloudflare dashboard, that would be great too; there's a ton of options in there and a lot of them are defaulted to "off"

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[–] krash@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I've tried different approaches with fail2ban, crowdsec, VPNs, etc. What I settled on is to divide the data of my services in two categories: confidential and "I can live with it leaking".

The ones that host confidential data is behind a VPN and has some basic monitoring on them.

The ones that are out in the public are behind a WAF from cloudflare with pretty restrictive rules.

Yes, cloudflare suck etc., but the value of stopping potential attacks before they reach your services is hard to match.

Just keep in mind: you need layers of different security measures to protect your services (such as backups, control of network traffic, monitoring and detection, and so on).

[–] a_fancy_kiwi@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

has some basic monitoring on them.

What monitoring software are you using?

I feel like the other measures you talked about (backups, condom of network traffic, etc) I'm doing ok on. Its really just the monitoring where I'm stuck. There's so many options

[–] krash@lemmy.ml 3 points 14 hours ago

There are so many monitoring tools with various degrees of complicated setup / configuration or the amount of information you get. And honestly, I've looked into various tools: checkmk, monit, Prometheus... And realised that I rarely look into that information anyway. Of all "fancy" tools, I liked the ease of Netdata to set up and the amount of information that you get. However, beware that their in the process to make their free / homelad offering worse. I've been eyeing beszel and don't forget CLI based tools that are avaible such as atop, btop, htop or glances.

If you want to delve deeper into the rabbit hole of monitoring, I can recommend you to read this article below: https://matduggan.com/were-all-doing-metrics-wrong/

[–] Xanza@lemm.ee 29 points 2 days ago (7 children)

By not making them publicly accessible. With Wireguard there's really no reason.

Setup service to be active on a subnet, enable Wireguard to VPN into the subnet and use the services.

[–] Anivia@feddit.org 2 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, I'm not gonna tell the 50 users of my plex server to set up wireguard on their devices so they can request movies and TV series on my overseer, when I can instead just use NPM to make it publically accessible with a password prompt

[–] Xanza@lemm.ee 5 points 21 hours ago

Your use case, and OPs, are completely different scenarios. I can't tell if you're being purposefully disingenuous or just flippantly stupid.

[–] peregus@lemmy.world 17 points 1 day ago (2 children)

With Wireguard there's really no reason.

Well, that's kinda of a personal choice. If somebody needs to have services accessible by someone else besides him, that service can't be behind a VPN (let's face the truth: we know that we can't ask all out relatives and friends to use a VPN).

[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

There’s also something to be said about some services being cordoned off in a VPN while leaving some public with security. I don’t necessarily want everyone within my full network if all I want is to share one service with them.

[–] peregus@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

For that, you can restrict access to a single service with iptables.

[–] Xanza@lemm.ee 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

This is effectively the same damn thing with a single exception. If your VPN is down, there's no access to your server. If for whatever reason your firewall is down, there's unrestricted access to your server...

VPN is unquestionably the correct choice 100 times out of 100.

[–] peregus@lemmy.world 1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

If for whatever reason your firewall is down, there’s unrestricted access to your server…

I don't know what kind of firewall you use, but if my firewall is down there is NO traffic at all passing through!

And by the way, since I've replied to someone that don't want to use VPN because he doesn't want to give access to the whole network, I meant that he could use a VPN AND iptables to restrict the guest access to single services instead of the whole network.

[–] Xanza@lemm.ee 0 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

I don’t know what kind of firewall you use, but if my firewall is down there is NO traffic at all passing through!

Only a hardware firewall would do this. If it's software, like implied in your post, no traffic is filtered and all connections are accepted.

VPN is the least amount of work for the most secure setup. There's nothing to even argue, its superior in every way.

[–] peregus@lemmy.world 1 points 19 hours ago

Only a hardware firewall would do this. If it’s software, like implied in your post, no traffic is filtered and all connections are accepted.

Talking abut netfilter, since it manages also the forwardning, it for some strange reason it should crash, NO IP traffic is flowing

VPN is the least amount of work for the most secure setup. There’s nothing to even argue, its superior in every way.

If there's nothing to even argue, then I say goodby to you since I'm here to discuss. All the best!

[–] Xanza@lemm.ee -3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

If somebody needs to have services accessible by someone else besides him, that service can’t be behind a VPN

Again, this is the reason VPNs exist. If that person needs access, then setup Wireguard...

It's like saying you don't need a front gate with an access code because then you would have to give out your own access code. But I mean, the lock has the ability to setup more access codes. And you're saying the only viable option is the leave the gate open and hire a guard to manage access. It's just... Weird and wrong.

[–] peregus@lemmy.world 1 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Again, this is the reason VPS’ exist.

What? What's the difference between a VPS and your home server? You may say that's a good practice to separate things, so maybe have a a VM with public facing services and another with more private stuff reachable only with a VPN. But for something like Nextcloud, it needs to be public (if you're not the only one using it), but it contains personal stuff and then comes the OP request!

[–] Xanza@lemm.ee 1 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

You may say that’s a good practice to separate things

You're missing the point. VPN isn't about separating anything... I'm not even sure what you mean by that. VPN is the accepted practice here. Unquestionably. You create private services, and for security you only expose them to the least amount of people possible. You authenticate via VPN connections. You only have to maintain a single database of users to access any number of services, even tens of thousands.

OP is specifically talking about hosting local content that they want to protect. VPN is the solution here.

[–] peregus@lemmy.world 1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Well...if you edit your post after someone has replied to it at least specify what's you've edited and don't pretend that the answer that somebody else has already given you wasn't about your non edited post!
If you (my mistake) wrote VPS instead of VPN, you can't pretend that I've answered about VPN!
If you can convince your family member and your friends to use a VPN to use your service, that's good for you, and I mean it!
But saying that it's quite impossible to do that, I think that I'm speaking for 99% of the self hoster (is this correct in English? Bah, you got me!)

[–] Xanza@lemm.ee 0 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

The entire point of selfhost is to host private services not available to the public. By literal definition, that's allowing only local traffic to connect to your services. It's infinitely more secure. A VPN allows you to extend those services over the clearnet to authorized devices via virtualized networks. You don't have to worry about messing with inbound/outbound ports, or worrying about software failure or misconfigurations accidentally exposing you to the clearnet. You don't have to worry about DDoS, or abuse. Being attacked? Bring down your VPN and that completely shuts down your issue. Your network is completely unreachable by anyone but a local host.

There's simply no room for an argument. VPN is objectively better in all possible situations.

[–] peregus@lemmy.world 1 points 19 hours ago

The entire point of selfhost is to host private services not available to the public
Probably your entire point, a lot of self hosters self host services that family members and friends can reach most of the time without the need of a VPN. This very community is full of examples.

It’s infinitely more secure

I'm with you about that.

There’s simply no room for an argument.

As stated in the other post, I'm sorry about that, I'm here to discuss and learn, if you don't have room for an argument, our discussion ends here.

VPN is objectively better in all possible situations.

Exactly! in all possible situation!!!

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[–] jagged_circle@feddit.nl 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Wazuh

Active responses are like fail2ban but better

[–] a_fancy_kiwi@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

I'll look into it, thank you

[–] beerclue@lemmy.world 18 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Check out crowdsec. Like fail2ban, but with crowdsourced lists on top.

[–] a_fancy_kiwi@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

will do, thanks

[–] truthfultemporarily@feddit.org 17 points 2 days ago

I would put this stuff behind VPN.

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 21 points 2 days ago (2 children)

So there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail2ban which helps already to some degree.

But what are you trying to prevent? You have your services in a docker container, hopefully not running as root, which already makes it difficult to break out even if through a bug someone would be able to get access to the docker container.

I mean its not like your stuff is very important for someone to break in like the pentagon, you probably just have some photos from your phone on it, some lights can be switched on and off and some temperatures read.

I'm not trying to say that you should not care about it but I'm trying to figure out what your threat model is.

[–] a_fancy_kiwi@lemmy.world 24 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

I feel weird about having those apps on the internet and basically being blind to threats. I mean yeah, I'm not a target on anyone's list and most IPs visiting the site are bots but I would still like to know what's going on.

I don't work in tech for a living, this is just a hobby for me so I have limited time to work on this stuff and do research. It's very possible I fucked something up and don't know it. I figured if I at least got an alert that said "hey, your immich server db was dumped and sent to ", I could at least turn it off

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Yah, it's just a hobby for you, but it's also a hobby for script kiddies to use Shodan to find people with out of date web interfaces and pop them. I tell you right now, the Immich team would be the first to say not to put their application publicly accessible.

Just don't get into this practice, it ends in tears and is way more maintenance to stay protected than just setting up tailscale and using that.

[–] AtariDump@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

By the time you get the alert and act on it, it’s too late.

Don’t expose these things to the open internet; VPN back into your network and access them.

[–] credo@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

IOT botnets are a thing. And if someone wanted to fire sell the US, all the vulnerable home networks would be on the table too. Great for a bit if extra chaos.

[–] foggy@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Auth portal for VPN tunnell -> Authelia -> fail2ban -> VLAN with services only.

ELK stack monitors the LAN. (Including VLAN)

Keep that VLAN segmented. You're good unless you're a DOGE employee, then I'd recommend quite a bit more security.

[–] pezhore@infosec.pub 4 points 1 day ago

This is the way. Layer 3 separation for services you wish to access outside of the home network and the rest of your stuff, with a VPN endpoint exposed for remote access.

It may be overkill, but I have several VLANs for specific traffic:

  • DMZ - for Wireguard (and if I ever want to stand up a Honeypot)
  • Services - *arr stack, some Kubes things for remote development
  • IoT - any smart things like thermostat, home assistant, etc
  • Trusted - primary at home network for laptops, HTPCs, etc

There are two new additions: a ext-vpn VLAN and a egress-vpn VLAN. I spun up a VM that's dual homed running its own Wireguard/OpenVPN client on the egress side, serving DHCP on the ext-vpn side. The latter has its own wireless ssid so that anyone who connects to it is automatically on a VPN into a non-US country.

[–] a_fancy_kiwi@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

I've seen a bunch of people recommend Authelia. Do you mind if I ask why you went with it over other software? I only went with authentik because I found a tutorial on it first

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 10 points 2 days ago (3 children)

We expose about a dozen services to the open web. Haven't bothered with something like Authentik yet, just strong passwords.

We use a solid OPNSense Firewall config with rather fine-grained permissions to allow/forbid traffic to the respective VMs, between the VMs, between VMs and the NAS, and so on.

We also have a wireguard tunnel to home for all the services that don't need to be available on the internet publicly. That one also allows access to the management interface of the firewall.

In OPNSense, you get quite good logging capabilities, should you suspect someone is trying to gain access, you'll be able to read it from there.

I am also considering setting up Prometheus and Grafana for all our services, which could point out some anomalies, though that would not be the main usecase.

Lastly, I also have a server at a hoster for some stuff that is not practical to host at home. The hoster provided a very rudimentary firewall, so I'm using that to only open necessary ports, and then Fail2Ban to insta-ban IPs for a week on the first offense. Have also set it up so they get banned on Cloudflare's side, so before another malicious request ever reaches me.

Have not had any issues, ever.

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[–] q7mJI7tk1@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

So among my services I self host, a few need to be publicly accessible for work. For those I wish to remain private, Caddy only allows private IP ranges, plus then Authelia as auth which is set to 30 days. There is then the login of each service behind Authelia as well. It's as good as it needs to be for my needs.

If I were only self hosting private services, then as others have said, I would put all access through a VPN.

Edit: I should add that of course the private services are then only accessed via VPN to the router (part of the private IP ranges). Caddy as reverse proxy also obfuscates the subdomain names I use.

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[–] j4k3@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I've half ass thought about this but never have tried to actually self host. If you have access to all devices, why not just use your own self signed certificates to encrypt everything and require the certificate for all connections? Then there is never a way to log in or connect right? The only reason for any authentication is to make it possible to use any connection to dial into your server. So is that a bug or a feature. Maybe I'm missing something fundamental in this abstract concept that someone will tell me?

[–] a_fancy_kiwi@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago (12 children)

If you have access to all devices, why not just use your own self signed certificates to encrypt everything and require the certificate for all connections?

Sounds like you are describing a VPN. I was using that setup before but small stuff like immich album sharing via a link won't work properly. Also, having to ensure a vpn is on and connected is a little to much to ask of my partner; they would turn it off and forget about it and then ask why their app wasn't working :/

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