I just setup a minecraft server on an old laptop, but to make it acessible i needed to open up a port. Currently, these are the ufw rules i have. when my friends want to connect, i will have them find their public ip and ill whilelist only them. is this secure enough? thanks
`Status: active
To Action From
22/tcp ALLOW Anywhere Anywhere ALLOW my.pcs.local.ip`
also, minecraft is installed under a separate user, without root privlege
A port is not secure or insecure. The thing that can lead to security risks is the service that answers that port.
Use strong authentication and encryption on those services and keep them up to date.
I would use something like wireguard, or another VPN service you can host yourself if your router supports it natively.
From the looks of it Minecraft servers seem to have dogshit authentication, so using some form of private network setup is going to be your best move.
You don’t have to host the VPN on the router. You can also host it on a separate machine or the same one that’s running the Minecraft server.
Oh for sure. What I meant was “check router for a built in VPN and use it if it has one, otherwise use wireguard because it’s the easiest”.
The specific VPN doesn’t really matter so much. The built-in one would be the easiest, so checking for a solution that took a few clicks is worth it. :)
Fair enough.
But personally I would recommend trying to setup wireguard if your router doesn’t have it integrated. It’s just so much faster than OpenVPN (usually the only built in option).
as long you are only forwarding Minecraft’s 25565 port from your router to your server machine, it should be fine. Just make sure to keep Online mode on, use the whitelist, and get your plugins from trusted sources. Otherwise I wouldn’t worry too much.
I see others recommending VPN solutions like zerotier for your friends to connect to; I don’t personally feel like this is necessary, and (in my experience), making your friends do more technical setup than just connecting to the server is often a big turn-off.
Bonus: If you ever take a peek at your server logs while it’s running (and exposed to the Internet, if you avoid said VPN solutions), you might notice a lot of weird connections from IPs and usernames you don’t recognize. These are server scanners and threat scanners that look for vulnerable servers to connect to and exploit. This is normal and you’ll be fine as long as you keep that whitelist and stay up-to-date on developments in the server admin space.
Why is port 22 open? Is this on your router as well or just the server?
This is SSH, which you should pretty much never have open (to the internet! Local is fine) MC is by default 25565. You will have every bot on the internet probing that port.
Having SSH open to the internet is normal. Don’t use password authentication with weak passwords.
Normal for who? I wouldn’t expose SSH on 22 to the internet unless you have someone whose full time job is monitoring it for security and keeping it up to date. There are a whole lotta downsides and virtually no upsides given that more secure alternatives have almost zero overhead.
Shodan reports that 35,780,216 hosts have SSH exposed to the internet.
Moving SSH to ports other than 22 is not security. The bots trying port 22 on random addresses with random passwords don’t have a chance of getting in unless you’re using password authentication with weak passwords or your SSH is very old.
SSH security updates are very infrequent and it takes practically no effort to keep SSH up to date. If you’re using a stable distribution, just enable automatic security updates.
I had it open for a web server for 2.5 years because I was lazy and my IP changed a lot and I traveled and didn’t have a VPN setup and never had any issues as far as I could tell. Disabled password and root auth but was also fine with wiping that server if there were issues. It’s certainly not recommended but isn’t immediately always going to be an issue
yeah no I should have considered that. didn’t lick the most secure password. will change when I get home
Don’t use passwords for public SSH in the first place. Disable password authentication and use pubkeys.
Your ssh rule says it’s from anywhere. You want to change port 22 to 25565, and run /op username on your Minecraft server to whitelist your friends. Make sure your whitelist flag is turned on with your server config.
Instead of allowing traffic over your port from anywhere, you can specify your friend’s external IP.
More effort than I would consider. I’d just allow all traffic incoming on that port. I’d only consider whitelist if someone was giving me grief. Even then that would be after blacklisting an IP wasn’t solving my problem.
Port 22 is the default SSH port and it receives a TON of malicious traffic any time it’s open to the whole internet. 20 years ago I saw a newly installed server with a weak root password get infected by an IP address in China less than an hour after being connected to the open internet.
With all the bots out there these days it would probably take a lot less time if we ran the same experiment again.
Ha. That’s my bad. I didn’t even read the firewall rules listing 22/SSH. I agree on not opening 22 to the world. It just invites bots throwing passwords at it.
I just read Minecraft in the original post which from reading runs from 25565 which I wouldn’t worry about. If OP needs 22 for admission I’d either whitelist it or use a VPN/Tailscale.
25565 also gets a decent amount of malicious traffic because of Minecraft though. I’d recommend switching the port to something different at the very least. When I hosted a server for the first time on 25565 my router pretty immediately gave me warnings about attempted network traffic coming from Europe/Asia when I (and everyone I gave the IP to) live in the US.
