So everyone is talking about cloudflare tunnels and I decided to give it a shot.
However, I find the learning curve quite hard and would really appreciate a short introduction into how they work and how do I set them up…
In my current infrastructure I am running a reverse proxy with SSL and Authentik, but nothing is exposed outside. I access my network via a VPN but would like to try out and consider CF. Might be easier for the family.
How does authentication work? Is it really a secure way to expose internal services?
Thanks!
Lol, decided to ask chatGPT this question, turned out pretty well:
Alright, imagine you have a magic tunnel that can connect different places together. But this is not an ordinary tunnel that you can see or walk through. It’s a special tunnel that works with the internet!
You know when you want to visit a website on your tablet or computer, you type its address in a web browser, right? Well, sometimes websites need extra protection to stay safe from bad things on the internet. That’s where Cloudflare Tunnel comes in!
Cloudflare Tunnel is like a superhero that helps keep websites safe. It creates a secret passage between the website and Cloudflare’s special servers. When people try to visit the website, their requests go through this secret tunnel first.
Now, imagine there are some bad guys who want to do bad things to the website. They try to find the website, but all they see is the secret tunnel. They can’t see the website or know where it is. It’s like the website is hiding!
But good people, like you and me, can still find the website because we know the secret. We can use the magic tunnel to reach the website and see what’s there. Cloudflare Tunnel helps protect the website from the bad guys and lets the good people get through.
So, Cloudflare Tunnel is like a special secret tunnel on the internet that keeps websites safe from bad guys and helps the good people find them.
I used one to reach my qbittorrent selfhost. I found a cool docker image. It bundles a openVPN connection with qbittorrent so that I don’t need my home server to be on a VPN at all times. As well as ensures traffic always goes through VPN. I was running into an issue where I could not reach from my home network. But when I used a cloudflare tunnel it somehow worked. This was all until I realized there was an environment variable of LAN I needed to set which allowed connections from my home network 😮💨
I would definitely recommend this setup for any torrenting. I’ve been using it for years with zero IP leaks. Believe me, Spectrum would let me know. They did before I had setup.
EDIT: just realized the guy deleted the docker image for that based on a false positive (that’s been a false positive for a year). I reuploaded their same image to my docker account. Still works without any leak, not sure why they took such a drastic measure.
What I’m doing is using a dedicated VPN Gateway container. The instances running delicate services have a static default route to the GW-container.
This is an extra step, but allows me add easily route other services or clients or even whole networks through my VPN without additional setup or specialized containers bundling both.
Wanna use it on the phone? Change the gateway address. Wanna use it from my Linux machine? Add a static default route. Etc…
Works flawlessly!
That sounds better since it doesn’t have any kind of bundling of images. Do you have a link to anything public I can look at to try out a similar setup?
Unfortunately not at the moment, as all is kinda fiddled and setup manually, but I’m redoing my home lab in a couple of weeks. Send me a message and I’ll send you the docker image or script!
But basically I did the following:
- enable ipv4 forwarding
- configure and start VPN tunnel
- set the default route to the tunnel
- set the gw for reaching the remote vpn server to the local gw
- sets routes for the local network to the local gw
If your vpn goes down, the default route shall still point to the remote gw, but as it isn’t there you also have a kill switch. Voila!
I am looking into gluetun but haven’t tried it yet.
Edit: this doesn’t protect you from someone snooping the traffic inside your local net, but protects it starting from the point where it leaves the local vpngw. The traffic is unencrypted between that and your client.
Cloudflared tunnels are great. No firewall ports to open.
I installed the Cloudflared docker, which is headless, and fed it my API key. Then Cloudflared creates a VPN between your system and theirs. Then, think of Cloudflare as the reverse proxy, you just configure it on the CF site instead of locally. No need for a reverse proxy on your side.
I’ve not done anything with auth on it as what I run I don’t mind being public. If you still want to run a local auth, you can set it to hit your local reverse proxy instead and do it that way.
The benefits are you don’t need to open firewall ports and your local IP is irrelevant so no need for dynamic DNS.
Just a side note that “not opening firewall ports” is not inherently a security benefit if you’re exposing the same service on the same port on the same host anyway via your reverse proxy setup.
If you were to measure your level of “security” on having ports open or not alone, then using Cloudflare tunnels could be considered worse, since an outbound VPN connection to Cloudflare is essentially circumventing your firewall’s protection entirely, meaning you’re effectively opening all 65,535 TCP and UDP ports instead of one, albeit only to Cloudflare.
There are benefits to using Cloudflare tunnels but “not opening firewall ports” is not one of them. And you could just as easily accomplish the same thing without Cloudflare by using a VPS and Tailscale with the selfhosted Headscale coordinator.
Meh, it’s sorta 6 of one and half-dozen of another. The benefit of not opening ports on a firewall isn’t necessarily a security one so much of a convenience one for people who don’t know how their routers work or no access to open those ports. The only security value is it prevents any exploits on your router and a port scan against your network won’t show those ports open. That makes it easier to hide the fact that your hosting something. I’d agree, it’s not a huge security vector to worry about, but can help people not see your real IP which has tangible value.
Really, your offloading security to CF and putting trust in them to do a better job than you, but as you said, in doing so they can sort of get the keys to your kingdom. I think it’s just worth it with their other tools to block bots and other common exploits that a Netgear home router isn’t looking for.
The problem with a vps and tailscale is its one more thing to manage and a vps costs money and cf is free.
In effect, Cloudflare would give protection against DDoS attacks before requests would even hit your servers. That much said you can implement mitigations on the reverse proxy itself. One example would be fail2ban.
I’m sure there are additional steps that you can take. I’m not a fan of Cloudflare because their free offering has some caveats and violating these could be problematic. I have a cloud VPS with a WireGuard tunnel back to my server. I don’t have to do anything ugly like port forwarding. The cloud VPS runs NGINX as a reverse proxy. It’s a relatively simple and effective setup.
Thanks! How do you handle that with internal DNS? I suppose you’d need to setup the exact same proxies on the internal and external server, and local DNS handles which one my domain it’s being resolved to?
Right now the internal DNS I use has a TLD of .lan but that’s pretty much for my personal convenience. I access my websites by their FQDN internally with no issue. So I am not sure what your tring to achieve. Mind elaborating?
Of course! So in order to get maximum speed on your services, you wanna use a direct internal route when you’re inside your net. My understanding is, that when using an external cloud VPS with a proxy, local clients go through unnecessary routing…
Local request --out--> external VPS (proxy) --request data from internal--> receive data on external proxy --send back--> local client
So what I am saying, all requests are unnecessarily routed through the external VPS. So one would have to create an exact duplicate reverse proxy internally to avoid leaving the net. When accessing domain.com, the internal DNS returns the local proxy IP, when outside you receive the cloud VPS IP.
Or am I missing something?
Thank you for taking the time!
Basically just an easier way to get a tunnel into your server, instead of having to configure a reverse proxy or manage certs. I just have the cloud flared docker installed, then on their site under the tunnels section I just assign whatever domains or subdomains to all my services via a local ip address. Im doing a couple things that definitely break TOS lol. But imma let it ride till they stop me then I guess I’ll switch to a reverse proxy
