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.
Here’s how I solved the problem: https://blog.lchapman.dev/self-hosting-foundations/
Not free, but pretty cheap. Been doing it for a year or so and I’m happy with the solution.
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).
If you use strong passwords and keep an eye on your logs you are no less safe than any other public facing entity. I’ve had a bunch of services exposed since 2020 so far no one has even bothered to brute the basic auth on Apache (though bot nets take a run at SSH a few times a year).
My understanding is that it’s just not as secure. Any open port can be considered a potential way for a hacker to get in. Of course, that doesn’t mean it will 100% happen and you will get hacked, but at least in the case of Tailscale, it does it in a secure way that makes it so you don’t have those open ports. Basically, it’s not bad to just expose them to the internet, it’s just not as secure as using tools like Tailscale.
