For a self-hosted application with a valid SSL certificate and support for OAuth, what are the benefits that Cloudflare Access provides? From what I can tell, it also filters traffic to possibly block attacks? Can it even be used with a self-hosted app if you aren’t also running Cloudflare Tunnel? Is there a better alternative (that also integrates with major OAuth providers like Google, Github, etc) for self-hosters? Thanks for the help in understanding how this works.
I use it within my Kubernetes to expose services outsides my house, and then I use Azure AD to manage access.
I know this isn’t very self hosted, but for me where I have a dynamic IP and don’t want to play with port forwarding, it’s really good. Nice and easy especially with Kubernetes and the helm chart I wrote
Don’t you need to configure DDNS regardless? And port forwarding as well unless you went with tunnels?
For cloudflare tunnels no, it does a nat punch through I think it’s called, where it connects from inside your network out to 2 edge locations to cloudlfare, where it then can send traffic back and forwards.
If I wanted to expose by port forwarding, then yes you are correct, I could configure ddns.
Personally, I would configure my own version of DDNS where it’s just a cron job once every 5 minutes to run terraform and check if my public IP has changed, and if it has run an apply.
Does that answer the question?
Benefits have been listed out here by others. The few restrictions I found on the free tier of Cloudflare is that they limit file size for uploads to 200MB. If you were exposing your NAS and want to upload a large file then you need to pay for Cloudflare or it will be restricted.
Last I’d checked (a couple years ago), they don’t permit media streaming via a free account, just serving static files. (I mean… Fair.)
I had several issues with emby/plex not loading streams through cloudflare connections, or really struggling to do so. Disabling cloudflare proxying for that subdomain solved that.
Now I just have cloudflare proxying my static file server and Ombi. Emby is a direct connection and everything else is behind OpenVPN.
There’s not much reasons of exposing any of your local services to internet. Use vpn to have access to your local resources. This is best you can come up with for your home lab
Question : what if I need to access my home computer from a work laptop and I’m not allowed to install things such as the WireGuard VPN client. Do I use native say Windows VPN?
Assuming it’s a Linux server at home and you can use SSH on your work computer, there’s a couple ways to do this.
- Install a web based terminal client
- Setup Cloudflare tunnels on your home server and use the the SSH proxy. I do this with a simple helper in
~/.ssh/config:
Match host "*.cf"
ProxyCommand /usr/local/bin/cloudflared access ssh --hostname $(echo %h | sed 's/\.cf$/.homelab.nz/')
ForwardAgent yes
Don’t forget that Cloudflare offers no protection against traffic from within Cloudflare. There were several incidents in the past where Cloudflares services where used to break into other clients services (hijacking).
Do you have the examples of this so I can take a look? Was it ports forwarded that were opened to all cloudflare ranges, or tunnels and a backend exploit?
You can look online. Basically Cloudflares blocking features exclude Cloudflares own IP ranges. Someone used their own services (in their own IP range) to attack services and since the request came from a Cloudflare IP it was not blocked or filtered. Pretty embarassing if you ask me. But this is normal in the cloud.
Remember that cloudflare will see your traffic, Even with an ssl certificate.
Right, so I’m trying to determine if that is worse or if exposing a service without Cloudflare (and being more at risk from someone trying to break into my service because of not having the monitoring/protection Cloudflare provides) is worse.