azukaarB
The VPN part is basically a “secret” (encrypted) tunnel between multiple devices/servers. Whenever one device wants to talk to your server, it sends messages via the tunnel, and on the other end, the tunnel dispatch the message to the right port. Using this, you have access to your server without exposing all your ports, so only people connected to your VPN can see it. Keep in mind this is different than a traditional VPN who transfer all your data to the server to hide your IP. Here only the traffic to your server is tunneled. This way your other activities are not affected (performance wise especially)
2FA uses any authenticator app (the one where you scan a QR code and get a 6 digits number) to protect your account. If someone gets your password, they still cant login because they also need your phone (unlocked) to get the 6 digits (it changes every 30 secs)
You need root access to manage docker containers that’s (almost) unavoidable. Also Cosmos does not support managing remote docker instances. On the other hand, a good (and secure) pattern is to use Constellation (the integrated VPN) on 2 servers with cosmos installed on each. you can connect them together. One of the servers (the seedbox) is the main server running services but it is not exposed on the internet and the only way to access it is to connect to the VPN on the other VPS
Don’t get me wrong, I am fully aware that you need to reduce as much as possible the amount of access something has but as you said:
you should never have permissions to things you don’t need
well Cosmos needs to see your files if you want Cosmos to manage your files. It’s that simple. By default its on because it is needed for Cosmos to function. You can remove it, but at the expense of some of the functionalities of the server.
By the way Cosmos, as a Docker management software, has access to your docker socket. Which mean, you can remove anything you want from the container, technically, it can add it back itself. Having access to the socket means being able to manage the containers, including itself. In other words, having this mount in the docker run command is just a comfort thing, but in term of privilege, whether it’s Cosmos or Portainer or any other docker manager, they have full root access to your system and that’s unavoidable.
why not have -v /CasaFolder:/mnt/host or something similar
Because it would require users to always update their Cosmos containers to add additional folders all the time, giving a terrible and very error prone user experience.
If there is a solution out there, that solves that problem (as in allows Cosmos to continue to work the same without that mount) then I will gladly implement it. But as far as I can see there isn’t such solution