this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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Are you exposing any ports on your home server? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by fhein@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Maybe I'm using the wrong terms, but what I'm wondering is if people are running services at home that they've made accessible from the internet. I.e. not open to the public, only so that they can use their own services from anywhere.

I'm paranoid a f when it comes to our home server, and even as a fairly experienced Linux user and programmer I don't trust myself when it comes to computer security. However, it would be very convenient if my wife and I could access our self-hosted services when away from home. Or perhaps even make an album public and share a link with a few friends (e.g. Nextcloud, but I haven't set that up yet).

Currently all our services run in docker containers, with separate user accounts, but I wouldn't trust that to be 100% safe. Is there some kind of idiot proof way to expose one of the services to the internet without risking the integrity of the whole server in case it somehow gets compromised?

How are the rest of you reasoning about security? Renting a VPS for anything exposed? Using some kind of VPN to connect your phones to home network? Would you trust something like Nextcloud over HTTPS to never get hacked?

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[–] roi@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For lots of things I self host that I wanna expose, I’ll just open a random port like 6952 and then reverse proxy w/ nginx on my web server. Not sure how secure it is, but it works

[–] cestvrai@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Ports are probed and scanned constantly so a random port doesn’t make so much difference. I would use a strict firewall with the server IP whitelisted.

[–] dandroid@dandroid.app 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Can they see what you are hosting on that port, though? Like say I want to open ssh to my server from the internet (I don't do this and I wouldn't unless it was temporary), but I don't want to open it on port 22 because that's too obvious. Are there bots that just try every protocol until they find one that your server responds to? Or is there a way to dig up information on what is being exposed behind that port?

[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ever since I moved to a ridiculously high port I haven't had any access attempts on my server. 6952 won't do shit, but if you're between 40000 and 65000 you probably won't get anything.

[–] Retiring@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That’s security through obscurity and one should never rely on this strategy alone

[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

If it's your only form of security then it's bad. But if it's on combination with other measures then it's a good thing.

I wouldn't let anyone who hits my ip/port directly into my openvpn. But not having china and russia bomboarding me with requests is nice.