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Selfhosted @lemmy.world
TedZanzibar @feddit.uk

How safe is self-hosting a public website behind Cloudflare?

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.

42 comments

  • 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.

  • You'll be fine enough as long as you enable MFA on your Nas, and ideally configure it so that anything "fun", like administrative controls or remote access, are only available on the local network.

    Synology has sensible defaults for security, for the most part. Make sure you have automated updates enabled, even for minor updates, and ensure it's configured to block multiple failed login attempts.

    You're probably not going to get hackerman poking at your stuff, but you'll get bots trying to ssh in, and login to the WordPress admin console, even if you're not using WordPress.

    A good rule of thumb for securing computers is to minimize access/privilege/connectivity.
    Lock everything down as far as you can, turn off everything that makes it possible to access it, and enable every tool for keeping people out or dissuading attackers.
    Now you can enable port 443 on your Nas to be publicly available, and only that port because you don't need anything else.
    You can enable your router to forward only port 443 to your Nas.

    It feels silly to say, but sometimes people think "my firewall is getting in the way, I'll turn it off", or "this one user needs read access to one file, so I'll give read/write/execute privileges to every user in the system to this folder and every subfolder".

    So as long as you're basically sensible and use the tools available, you should be fine.
    You'll still poop a little the first time you see that 800 bots tried to break in. Just remember that they're doing that now, there's just nothing listening to write down that they tried.

    However, the person who suggested putting cloudflare in front of GitHub pages and using something like Hugo is a great example of "opening as few holes as possible", and "using the tools available".
    It's what I do for my static sites, like my recipes and stuff.
    You can get a GitHub action configured that'll compile the site and deploy it whenever a commit happens, which is nice.

  • 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

42 comments