I see a lot of people here uses some form of remote access tool (VPN/Tailscale) to access their home network when not at home. I can’t really do this because my phone (iOS) can only activate one VPN profile at a time, and I often need this for other stuff.
So I chose to expose most web based services on the public internet, behind Authelia. But I don’t know how safe this is.
What I’m really unsure are things like Vaultwarden: while the web interface is protected by Authelia (even use 2FA), its API address needs to be bypassed for direct access, otherwise the mobile APP won’t work. It feels like this is negative everything I’ve done so far.
If you don’t need to, then DON’T. I only expose my personal website, my CardDAV server, my Gitea instance and my SSH server. Update them regularly
If your application is insecure/old, use it behind a VPN
Not bad practice just not as secure.
You can’t beat the security of not exposing it but sometimes you need to so then you need to mitigate it with certs, reverse proxy or VPN.
It depends on what you need and what your thread model is.
I have my nextcloud server exposed, I keep it up to date, patched, etc. but I’d love to use the extra protection of a VPN. Just … I don’t think mobile apps work very well with that, unless I keep my phone constantly connected to the VPN, right? Or is there a smart way to do that?
Yea that’s basically the reason why I can’t use a VPN.
In fact there isn’t really a problem to leave your phone connected to the selfhosted VPN all the time. If split tunneling works properly, only traffic that access your home network would actually go through the VPN, all others will just get bypassed.
But in my case, I already need to be connected to another VPN most of my day, so can’t really go this route.
deleted by creator
I’m a network engineer and >15 years of experience in IT. It’s never “safe”. Not even in corporate IT. You’re a home user and it’s less likely you’ll be targeted but bad actors do comb the internet for known vulnerabilities. Patch your shit, limit exposure, enable MFA on everything. I don’t run it, but I feel slightly sketched out not behind something like a Palo Alto. But again I’m just a small potato in a big sea and I patch everything.
There will always be risk. Just do what feels right for you. Follow beat practices.
It’s only bad practice if you don’t keep up on vulnerabilities/patching, don’t have any type of monitoring or ability to detect a potential breach, etc.
The nice thing about tucking everything behind a VPN is you only have one attack surface to really worry about.
I use a reverse proxy and client certificate authentication for anything I expose. That requires me to pre install the client certificate on all of my devices first, but afterwards they can connect freely via a web browser with no further prompting to authenticate. Anybody without the client certificate gets a 403 before they even get past the proxy.
There are limitations to this and overhead of managing a CA and the client certificates for your devices.