this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
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How safe is self-hosting a public website behind Cloudflare? (feddit.uk)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by TedZanzibar@feddit.uk to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I work in tech and am constantly finding solutions to problems, often on other people's tech blogs, that I think "I should write that down somewhere" and, well, I want to actually start doing that, but I don't want to pay someone else to host it.

I have a Synology NAS, a sweet domain name, and familiarity with both Docker and Cloudflare tunnels. Would I be opening myself up to a world of hurt if I hosted a publicly available website on my NAS using [insert simple blogging platform], in a Docker container and behind some sort of Cloudflare protection?

In theory that's enough levels of protection and isolation but I don't know enough about it to not be paranoid about everything getting popped and providing access to the wider NAS as a whole.

Update: Thanks for the replies, everyone, they've been really helpful and somewhat reassuring. I think I'm going to have a look at Github and Cloudflare's pages as my first port of call for my needs.

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[–] jgkawell@lemmy.world 54 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I'll let folks with more security experience dive into your specific question, but another option is to host your website on something like Github pages (using a static website generator like Jekyll) and point Cloudflare at it. That way you don't need anything pointed at your local network, get the uptime of Github, and still benefit from your own domain name.

That's what I'm doing with my own blog and it's been great. Github provides the service for free but if they ever charge for it I'll just start hosting it locally.

[–] TedZanzibar@feddit.uk 15 points 10 months ago (4 children)

OK that's genius, I will definitely look into that!

[–] 7Sea_Sailor@lemmy.dbzer0.com 27 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Or take github out of the equation and directly use cloudflare pages. It has its own pros and cons, but for a simple static blog it'll be more than enough, and takes out the CNAME hassle.

[–] DetachablePianist@lemmy.ml 2 points 10 months ago

Came here to say this^

[–] jgkawell@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago

If you have any issues or questions feel free to DM me here. I'd be happy to help out :)

[–] ducking_donuts@lemm.ee 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Speaking of Cloudflare, if you’re okay with not self hosting, then there’s Cloudflare Pages which is good for hosting static websites.

[–] CraigeryTheKid@lemm.ee 1 points 10 months ago

That's what I'm doing! I used it to make a "blog" of all the things I had to learn to switch to Linux for my home drives and daily gaming rig. Complete with copy buttons on the code blocks so I can do a complete reformat in minutes!

[–] AbsorbsQuickly@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

I do this via AWS amplify and it costs me a few cents a month as another option.

[–] crsu@lemmy.world 22 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I know it's not technically "self" hosted but I'd get a cheap yearly VPS somewhere and run a webserver off of that.For me its worth the peace of mind to keep my network a temple instead of a bus terminal. I paid $13 usd for the year for mine

[–] COASTER1921@lemmy.ml 2 points 10 months ago

+1 for VPS, the ionos ones are $2/mo and have unlimited bandwidth at 400mbps. That's basically the cost of electricity for a home server with orders of magnitude better reliability.

[–] TedZanzibar@feddit.uk 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

A VPS makes sense insofar as keeping things thoroughly isolated from my own systems, but the overhead of maintaining a box that's directly connected to the Internet like that isn't something I'm keen on and I'm not convinced I'd have the expertise to do it right from the outset.

[–] 7Sea_Sailor@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

Change the ssh port to something with 4-5 digits, disable ssh password Auth and use certificates only, don't expose any port other than ssh and 443.

If you're paranoid, use cloudflare as a proxy and set the VPS firewall to only accept incoming traffic from cloudflares ip list.

That's about it really.

[–] chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Changing port is security by obscurity and it doesn’t take much time for botnets to scan all of IPV4 space on all ports. See for example the ever updated list that’s available on Shodan.

Disable password login and use certificates as you’ve suggested already, add fail2ban to block random drive-bys, and you’re off to the races.

[–] CoopaLoopa@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 10 months ago

The Oracle Cloud VPS only has SSH key authentication enabled by default. You can also set it to only allow SSH from your home IP in the virtual firewall before the machine is ever spun up.

Their current free ARM offering is 1 machine with 4-cores and 24gb RAM for life. You can also add another 2 AMD machines with 1-core and 1gb RAM and still be in their free-tier.

If you're going to set it up and take advantage of the ARM machine, make sure you pick a home location for your account that has multiple availability zones. San Fran right now only has 1 zone, so if the shared ARM instances are all used up, you'll have to wait a few days and try again. Phoenix I think has 3, so you can try with another zone right away.

[–] gaylord_fartmaster@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

I guess I'm extremely paranoid then, my home IP doesn't change much and I just expose the port only to it from Oracle's site. I rarely touch mine though.

[–] 000@fuck.markets 1 points 10 months ago

I just restrict SSH to an internal VPN IP on all my servers (ZeroTier). 100% impossible to even try logging into them unless you've managed to crack into my network first.

[–] linearchaos@lemmy.world 17 points 10 months ago (2 children)

The first worry are vectors around the Synology, It's firmware, and network stack. Those devices are very closely scrutinized. Historically there have been many different vulnerabilities found and patched. Something like the log4j vulnerabilities back in the day where something just has to hit the logging system too hit you might open a hole in any of the other standard software packages there. And because the platform is so well known, once one vulnerability is found they already know what else exists by default and have plans for ways to attack it.

Vulnerabilities that COULD affect you in this case for few and far between but few and far between are how things happen.

The next concern you're going to have are going to be someone slipping you a mickey in a container image. By and large it's a bunch of good people maintaining the container images. They're including packages from other good people. But this also means that there is a hell of a lot of cooks in the kitchen, and distribution, and upstream.

To be perfectly honest, with everything on auto update, cloud flares built-in protections for DDOS and attacks, and the nature of what you're trying to host, you're probably safe enough. There's no three letter government agency or elite hacker group specifically after you. You're far more likely to accidentally trip upon a zero day email image filter /pdf vulnerability and get bot netted as you are someone successfully attacking your Argo tunnel.

That said, it's always better to host in someone else's backyard than your own. If I were really, really stuck on hosting in my house on my network, I probably stand up a dedicated box, maybe something as small as a pi 0. I'd make sure that I had a really decent router / firewall and slip that hosting device into an isolated network that's not allowed to reach out to anything else on my network.

Assume at all times that the box is toxic waste and that is an entry point into your network. Leave it isolated. No port forwards, you already have tunnels for that, don't use it for DNS don't use it for DHCP, Don't allow You're network users or devices to see ARP traffic from it.

Firewall drops everything between your home network and that box except SSH in, or maybe VNC in depending on your level of comfort.

[–] TedZanzibar@feddit.uk 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Are you my brain? This exactly the sort of thing I think about when I say I'm paranoid about self-hosting! Alas, as much as I'd like to be able to add an extra box just for that level of isolation it'd probably take more of a time commitment than I have available to get it properly setup.

The attraction of docker containers, of course, is that they're largely ready to go with sensible default settings out of the box, and maintenance is taken care of by somebody else.

[–] linearchaos@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

Oh yeah, I totally get the allure of containers. I use them myself just not in production.

To be fair, python and node both suffer from the same kind of worries. And stuff gets slipped into those repos not too infrequently.

[–] Gooey0210@sh.itjust.works 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Can i ask you to elaborate on this part

Assume at all times that the box is toxic waste and that is an entry point into your network. Leave it isolated. No port forwards, you already have tunnels for that, don't use it for DNS don't use it for DHCP, Don't allow You're network users or devices to see ARP traffic from it.

I used to have a separate box, but the only thing it did was port forwarding

Specifically i don't really understand the topology of this setup, and how do i set it up

[–] chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Cloudflare tunnel is a thin client that runs on your machine to Cloudflare; when there’s a request from outside to Cloudflare, it relays it via the established tunnel to the machine. As such, your machine only need outbound internet access (to Cloudflare servers) and no need for inbound access (I.e. port forwarding).

[–] Gooey0210@sh.itjust.works 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Thank you for your reply, but i actually was asking about the network stuff 😅

I used to use cloudflare tunnels for many years, now i'm a bit too tin foiled to use any cloudflare 😅

[–] chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net 2 points 10 months ago

Ah sorry I went down the wrong rabbit hole.

I’d imagine an isolated VLAN should be sufficient good starting point to prevent anyone from stumbling on to it locally, as well as any potential external intruder stumbling out of it?

[–] linearchaos@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You need to have a rather capable router / firewall combo.

You could pick up a ubiquity USG. Or set up something with an isp router and a PF sense firewall.

You need to have separate networks in your house. And the ability to set firewall rules between the networks.

The network that contains the hosting box needs to have absolutely no access to anything else in your house except it's route out to the internet. Don't have it go to your router for DHCP set it up statically. Don't have it go to your router for DNS, choose an external source.

The firewall rules for that network are allow outbound internet with return traffic, allow SSH and maybe VNC from your home network, then deny all.

The idea is that you assume the box is capable of getting infected. So you just make sure that the box can live safely in your network even if it is compromised.

[–] Gooey0210@sh.itjust.works 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

(I just noticed i replied to your another comment, but still to you 😬)

Now i'm a little bit confused, what does it do then?

If the box doesn't have access to anything on the network, how would it do anything?

[–] linearchaos@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The box you're hosting on only needs internet access to connect the tunnel. Cloudflare terminates that SSL connection right in a piece of software on your web server.

[–] Gooey0210@sh.itjust.works 1 points 10 months ago

I mean, what does it host if the only thing it has access to is the internet?

[–] hpca01@programming.dev 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Cloudflare tunnels are layer 7, so it's not unlimited access by any means. This also means that certain things will break btw, for example if your website uses websockets to load information, that isn't supported.

Next, I'd put the computer that is going to be hosting into an isolated vlan of its own and access via external URL only.

If you're going to use docker images, make sure to vet that they're updated often and always spin up the latest.

[–] daq@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

CF tunnels are layer 3, not 7 and they have support for web sockets. It's basically wireguard VPN with a few extras built on top.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/faq/cloudflare-tunnels-faq/

[–] hpca01@programming.dev 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

That document doesn't say what layer. But it does say it supports Websockets.

Just odd that when I try to set it up using a named tunnel I don't get an option to specify the WS service type. However it does require a service type if you want to connect to it.

Looking at this page it would seem that it's a layer 7. Although I could be wrong, but my front end app has issues finding my backend service for websockets.

Granted I even tried to connect to my private computer using other protocols. I couldn't get through. Anyway I'm most likely going to be taking that project offline soon.

[–] daq@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 10 months ago

No, but I thought I clarified that when I said it's basically wireguard VPN which operates using tcp/udp (layer 3.) layer 7 is stuff like https. CF tunnels are lower level.

Page you linked is missing the layer between CF and source server so it doesn't indicate layer. You can lookup wireguard protocol if you want more details.

[–] Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
CF CloudFlare
DNS Domain Name Service/System
IP Internet Protocol
SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access
SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
VNC Virtual Network Computing for remote desktop access
VPN Virtual Private Network
VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.

[Thread #384 for this sub, first seen 29th Dec 2023, 14:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] PoopMonster@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago

If it's a static site, you can host that anywhere for free on the big cloud providers, aws has s3 storage, Microsoft has blobs, github has pages, all which can be configured to run a site well under the paid tiers.

[–] peter@feddit.uk 3 points 10 months ago

If you're exposing via cloudflare tunnels instead of pointing at your public IP then eveything other people have said covers it. If you are using your public IP then it's worth blocking non-cloudflare IPs from accessing the site directly

[–] fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 2 points 10 months ago

I'm definitely a fan of Gitlab pages for simple webpages I just want on the Internet. It's nice to have the code hosted anyways (gives me that off site back up safety so my stuff at home can go down if needed).

[–] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com -1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

if you setup everything with even moderate attention to the security involved, youll be fine. sounds like youre already there.

this is a common scenario, not a crazy idea or implementation. just keep your shit up to date

[–] TedZanzibar@feddit.uk 0 points 10 months ago (2 children)

That's one of the issues I'm concerned about. I'm happy enough to let things auto-update on a tight schedule and capable enough to fix things if eg. Watchtower goes wrong or updates a container to a dodgy version, but what I don't want is to have "keeping things secure" turn into a second job.

[–] erev@lemmy.world 0 points 10 months ago

I run plenty of stuff off my home network, although I use VPSs now more for the higher availability than residential internet. So long as you put basic protections in place like fail2ban and a sensible firewall, you shouldn't have any issues.

[–] pete@lemmy.world 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

One option here is to host it internally, and then VPN or ssh tunnel to your network for access.

Keeping openssh or a VPN up to date and secure is a much simpler thing than a web framework.

Separate your network access and your services. You get in trouble trying to use your service to gate access to your network.

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