this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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For self hosting at least, having your own CA is a pain in the ass to make sure everything is safe and that nobody except you has access to your CA root key.
I'm not saying it's not doable, but it's definitely a lot of work and potentially a big security risk if you're not 100% certain of what you're doing.
No worse than protecting your ssh key. Just keep it somewhere safe.
Just use only VPN to access your services behind the reverse proxy, if you want prevent unauthorised connections.
CA certificates are not here to prevent someone accessing a site, they are here, so that you can be sure, that the server you are talking to is really the one belonging to the domain you entered and to establish a tunnel in order to send the API calls (html, css, javascript etc.) and answers encrypted.
That's the problem, if anyone somehow gets your root CA key, your encryption is pretty much gone and they can sign whatever they want with your CA.
It's a lot of work to make sure it's safe in a home setup.
You can just issue new certificates one per year, and otherwise keep your personal root CA encrypted. If someone is into your system to the point they can get the key as you use it, there are bigger things to worry about than them impersonating your own services to you.
And additionally, you can sign intermediate Certificates reducing the risk even more, since you can revoke and re-issue new ones any time.