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.
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
It’s not bad per se, but you really just need to understand the risks involved and have an idea of how to secure your services properly. I personally won’t expose anything if it doesn’t have some sort of centralized auth solution (LDAP preferred) and 2FA to better secure accounts.
It’s also good practice to have some way of mitigating brute-force attacks with something like fail2ban, and a way to outright block known bad IP addresses.
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.
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.
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).
