This is a decent writeup on applying “Zero Tust” principles to a home lab using mostly open source tools. I’m not the author, but thought it was worth sharing.
Zero trust, but you have to use Amazon AWS, Cloudflare, and make your own Telegram bot? And have the domain itself managed by Cloudflare.
Sounds like a lot of trust right there… Would love to be proven wrong.
ZeroTrust is a specific type of network security where every network device has its access to other devices validated and controlled, not a statement on the trustworthiness of vendors.
Instead of every device on a LAN seeing every other device, or even every device on a VLAN seeing other devices on a VLAN, each device can only connect with the other devices it needs to work, and those connections need to be encrypted. These connectioms are all monitored, logged and alerted on to make sure the system is working as intended.
You do need to trust or validate the tooling that does the above, regardless of what you’re using.
Yes and no. The auditing is likely the harder part. You can use something like tailscale or nebula vpn to get the always on vpn/ACLs. With a dozen or two devices, it should be doable at a home scale.
If you want clientless zerotrust then you’re talking heavier duty things like Palo alto gear and the like.
I’ve been researching zero-trust for my homelab recently and I’m considering OpenZiti instead of Cloudflare since I think it can all be self-hosted. The BrowZer from OpenZiti is especially interesting to me. The fact that I’m behind CGNAT is a hurdle though.
Yeah, I practice some ZeroTrust principles w/o using any of the above. I use Docker networks to associate services and their data and restrict them from accessing services/data they don’t need. I use HAProxy at the edge to route requests to specific nodes in my network, and all of that operates over my own WireGuard VPN. I’m working on creating VLANs for my network to further segment things, so I can dictate which devices can access which resources. For continuous monitoring and alerting, any separate device connected to my VPN would work (haven’t yet configured that); I personally don’t bother because my SO/kids will tell me if something they use goes down, and knowing a few minutes earlier wouldn’t matter.
You really don’t need AWS, Cloudflare, or Telegram for any of this. That said, it is interesting to read through when crafting your own solution, if only to check which parts you have and what parts you may have forgotten.
The document is filled with so much meaningless fluff that it’s annoying to read and was probably written by chatgpt and the cover image is AI generated: I don’t think there’s anything useful here.
this is a very bad article. It talks about “zero trust” but then suggests you to use corporate software, the cloud, sketchy russian apps to monitor your traffic at home. Also, I am not spending 2 hours a day going through my logs, nor I want a VM/container with 8GB of ram wasting 40% of my GPU on grafana.
Amused that the ‘This is private! You no hack!’ banner nonsense isn’t a dead thing yet.
Life protip: the bots scanning your shit will absolutely not care, and shockingly, criminals will also absolutely not care.
When done correctly, the banner is actually a consent banner. It’s a legal thing, not necessarily trying to discourage criminals. It’s informing users that all use will be monitored and it implies their consent to the technology policies of the organization. It’s more for regular users than criminals.
When it’s just “unauthorized access is prohibited”, though, especially on a single-user server? Not really any point. But since this article was based on compliance guidelines that aren’t all relevant to the homelab, I can see how it got warped into the empty “you no hack” banner.
I, too, don’t love the use of AWS/Cloudflare, while I get that you can simply replace AWS S3 with something else for backups, this server setup is innately based on using Cloudflare.
Maybe I should do a write up on my setup, as I don’t use Cloudflare or AWS. I do use backblaze and OVH
Will see what I can do, will probably be on https://homelab.horwood.biz/
I’d appreciate it as well.
I have a somewhat sophisticated setup as well that doesn’t use Cloudflare (aside from domain and DNS hosting) or AWS (I use a simple Hetzner VPS). I’m considering using Backblaze for backups, and everything else is self-hosted.
One of my main goals is that every responsibility should be modular and have a compatible drop-in replacement. I’m very interested to read what others with a similar perspective have done.
Will see what I can do, will probably be on https://homelab.horwood.biz/
What is a good alt for cloudflare here tbh?
I’ve done wire guard, and tor service to obfuscate the network, and crowdsec for a good external firewall, and linkerd gateway to actual services (and keycloak for sso).
Besides adding gotelaport for more fine grained access, idk what else you could do, but even then idk if its still competitive as someone else’s network taking your ddos loads lol
