I currently have a home server which I use a lot and has a few important things in it, so I kindly ask help making this setup safer.

I have an openWRT router on my home network with firewall active. The only open ports are 443 (for all my services) and 853 (for DoT).

I am behind NAT, but I have ipv6, so I use a domain to point to my ipv6, which is how I access my serves when I am not on lan and share stuff with friends.

On port 443 I have nginx acting as a reverse proxy to all my services, and on port 853 I have adguardhome. I use a letsencrypt certificate with this proxy.

Both nginx, adguardhome and almost all of my services are running in containers. I use rootless podman for containers. My network driver is pasta, and no container has “–net host”, although the containers can access host services because they have the option “–map-guest-addr” set, so I don’t know if this is any safer then “–net host”.

I have two means of accessing the server via ssh, either password+2fa or ssh key, but ssh port is lan only so I believe this is fine.

My main concern is, I have a lot of personal data on this server, some things that I access only locally, such as family photos and docs (these are literally not acessible over wan and I wouldnt want them to be), and some less critical things which are indeed acessible externally, such as my calendars and tasks (using caldav and baikal), for exemple.

I run daily encrypted backups into OneDrive using restic+backrest, so if the server where to die I believe this would be fine. But I wouldnt want anyone to actually get access to that data. Although I believe more likely than not an invader would be more interested in running cryptominers or something like that.

I am not concerned about dos attacks, because I don’t think I am a worthy target and even if it were to happen I can wait a few hours to turn the server back on.

I have heard a lot about wireguard - but I don’t really understand how it adds security. I would basically change the ports I open. Or am I missing something?

So I was hoping we could talk about ways to improve my servers security.

  • TedZanzibar@feddit.ukEnglish
    1·
    10 days ago

    Admittedly I’m paranoid, but I’d be looking to:

    1. Isolate your personal data from any web facing servers as much as possible. I break my own rule here with Immich, but I also…
    2. Use a Cloudflare tunnel instead of opening ports on your router directly. This gets your IP address out of public record.
    3. Use Cloudflare’s WAF features to limit ingress to trusted countries at a minimum.
    4. If you can get your head around it, lock things down more with features like Cloudflare device authentication.
    5. Especially if you don’t do step 4: Integrate Crowdsec into your Nginx setup to block probes, known bot IPs, and common attack vectors.

    All of the above is free, but past step 2 can be difficult to setup. The peace of mind once it is, however, is worth it to me.