Selfhosted

Unless you need to share/provide services for a public, then you shouldn't be setting up reverse proxies or cloudflare tunnels in my opinion. All you need is WireGuard for you and the handful of users that might be using it.

I have two ports open for:

1. WireGuard

2. SSH Tunnel

Both of these services will only accept key based authentication.

WireGuard is the main way that my wife and me access the services away from home. When our phones disconnect from our home's SSID, Tasker automatically connects to the WireGuard tunnel so we never lose access to services.

The SSH tunnel is just a fallback in case I get behind a firewall that might be doing DPI and blocking VPN traffic. The SSH tunnel operates on 443 to hopefully appear to be SSL traffic and allowed through. I've used it a very limited amount of times to get out from strict corporate firewalls.

I've had 22, 80, & 443 open for literal decades. Key auth only on ssh. 80 & 443 rev proxy to inside web services I want to expose only. Also host game servers as needed.

Keep your stuff up to date and follow best practices for securing it. Use things like crowdstrike. If you can segment your network, go ahead.

Unless you have a target on your head your main concern is going to be scripts looking for vulnerabilities.

I am not exposing any ports online. I do not trust myself

Instead, I am using Tailscale (Wireguard)

Ya my paranoia only allows me to expose Wireguard to access everything. I sleep better at night knowing that's the only thing exposed. Too many instances of major companies getting hacked who have dedicated security teams to manage that. I am one person, learning to manage my own stuff in my free time.

I open 443 and 80 on my router and forward it to a reverse proxy.

I have a couple of service that are exposed but most of them make sense only when I'm home so I whitelist private IP address on my reverse proxy.

If you do.your basic security such as updating your servers and services and not having dumb password, you shouldn't be afraid. Think about it, all of the services that you use is exposed on the internet. I did work for big company and they don't do much more than what you would probably do, except maybe having some automated monitoring that flag weird stuff. But hey, aside from bots, I don't think Russian hackers are interested in your stuff. Stay low profile with your exposed things and it's gonna be alright. Make sure you backup.

I’ve got a few layers of security for my homelab setup that make me feel pretty comfortable against random attacks.

Cloudflare is used to manage my domains and act as an external proxy to obscure my IP address, I’ve only forwarded ports 80 and 443 to Traefik my containerized reverse proxy, Authelia to add 2FA to services that I feel should have extra protection and my homelab nodes are on a separate vlan that is configured to drop all attempts to initiate communication outside of that vlan. I also use the ubiquity intrusion detection and prevention features on my firewall to attempt to stop any know malicious activity.

A majority of these configurations are overkill for a homelab, but were fun to implement. If you use a reverse proxy and keep your software up to date you will likely be fine unless you are specifically targeted by skilled hackers. Any random scans, or shotgun style attacks tend to target unpatched vulnerabilities.

Run a WireGuard VPN on your server and only forward its port (only UDP is needed) to your server.

Port 443 through Traefik and a port for Plex.

Run your own vpn, and only allow access to your services remotely if they are coming through that vpn.

Now you've shifted some of the security over to how secure your vpn server's authentication is.

Exposed is the right term. Other than my Wireguard VPN port, everything I have exposed is HTTPS behind Authelia MFA and SWAG.

I'm tempted to switch Wireguard for Tailscale, as the level of logging with WG has always bothered me. Maybe one day.

No, all of services are reverse-proxied through a WireGuard tunnel connected to my cloud VPS.

https, wireguard and mumble.

Just set up shodan monitoring, use burpsuite or owasp zap, and check your pcap files for accidental plaintext.

Also ssllabs has a nice website checker.

And get a NGFW

I have https open along with a non-standard port for ssh. Just for fun, I have the standard ssh port open, but redirecting to a Raspberry Pi running a honeypot. It's fun to mess with foreign bots trying to access my network.

I did for a while, but it never felt right.

I’m also lazy a f, so I purchased a new router that comes with WireGuard VPN and that works well enough with our iPhones.

I have ports open for Wireguard and Plex. So far, no issues that I’m aware of. Time will tell

I used to, but then switched to Cloudflare tunnels and I sleep much better now.

ssh to a few specific ip ranges, WireGuard to the world on a port I randomly picked

Check out tail scale. It's wire guard made easy. I expose http services to the public Internet, and have all my devices on the same network so I can access local services without exposing them to the public Internet.

I'm hosting an email server on a VPS that has fail2ban in it. A lot of ports are open but only wireguard and knockd are listening.

For remote server management, I would use wireguard for regular ssh access, but when I need to configure the wireguard I can just disable/reenable the wireguard-only ssh firewall rule using port knocking, there is also the option of using the serial console on the VPS web ui but it is slower.

Honestly, I'm not sure myself if my public facing services face a DoS attack. Well, there's always an option of using Cloudflare. With that being said though, I think in your case you should just use a free "VPN" like Tailscale or ZeroTier.

Openvpn to connect to the network, 80 and 443 for static websites, that's it.

Email gets delivered by a VPS via a different port, ssh acces via vps as well. No initial connections from an ip not from the my country as well.

Have a look in to Twingate, that should do exactly what you need.

None. If anything, I'd probably set up a VPN. But there's nothing so deathly important on my home network that I would need it while away from home. If I wanted to expose services, I'd use a reverse proxy and increase separation between services.

I don't technically open any ports to the public. I have a site-to-site wireguard tunnel to a hosted server. The hosted server is running a hypervisor with two virtual switches. One switch is my external switch and only my Wireguard server is using it. The other is an internal switch where I place other VMs for separate things. A container host, a terminal server with xrdp, a monitoring server with netdata, stuff like that. All technically, but unnecessarily, accessed through nginx proxy manager.

Because it's site2site with my home equipment on the Wireguard server, i can still connect to my home network where i host a number of separate services like HomeAssistant from outside the home network.

I don't use tailscale, but Wireguard vanilla is super easy to work with. I also have fail2ban pretty much everywhere I can install it because it takes up practically zero resources.

The only port I open is for wireguard. That way I can access all services on my LAN. Wireguard is also very secure and requires keys based authentication so is hard to brute. It also allows me to secure myself if I ever need to join WiFi or an untrusted network

I have one for OpenVPN and that's it.

I'm somewhat like you, in that I recognize I'm not a network guru. My home server with containers, as well as a few other devices are blacklisted from accessing the internet at my router. When i have needed outside access I have one machine with wireguard and some ip forwarding/masqurade etc so I have one connection in but can see the LAN for logging into stuff "locally". The only pain is non internet access devices losing sync with a time server.

I only have my (non default) ssh port exposed. I just use an ssh tunnel to access all my services. I don't know if this is a good idea or not, but it works for me.

For services that need to be public facing (Mastodon, Lemmy, Gitea...) I'm renting a VPS. Services that are only for personal use run on my home server and are only accessible through Wireguard, with the VPS acting as a "bridge" whenever I'm outside of my home network.

I run a few services that require ports to be open. Everything that can go behind a reverse proxy does so. But there's some that can't and that's OK.

Heaps