Hey everyone,
I’m one of the people who still used proton and am now in the process of switching everything and trying to selfhost more.
I sucessfully setup Vaultwarden. I also decided I should move away from having my dockers publicly exposed with nginx reverse proxy and switched everything over to netbird. Im using their proxy feature now to access everything with custom domains and followed a tutorial to setup a bring your own proxy server on a vps. So now all my services are only accessible when my netbird vpn is active. I also spun up a pihole docker and added that to my netbird dns servers to try and get ad blocking on my mobile devices. So far so good.
I wonder however that while some webui’s like vaultwarden run with https, others like radarr dont. Is this a problem or does it not matter so much since i have the vpn running?
I dont really understand how I would go about making them https though. Im on unraid for my dockers and don’t see why some use https and others don’t.
Sorry if this is a convoluted post, I’m quite in over my head with all the networking and dns stuff and just hoping I’m not doing something stupid.
Thanks for your help!
A reverse proxy like Caddy can get a ssl cert via dns challenge and add ssl to all your internal self hosted services, provided you have a domain hosted somewhere supported.
With everything behind tailscale, and hence no need for opening the firewall, my DNS challenge failed when I tried to set it up last time using certbot.
A dns challenge requires no inbound connections. You misconfigured something.
I read up on this since it was in my backlog anyway, but seems from Let’s Encrypt’s documentation that it is an issue for HTTP-01 challenges. Probably an issue with regards to terminology on my part since DNS-01 is exactly what makes this work.
if you’re accessing over the internet, always use TLS/HTTPS.
if you’re accessing over LAN, you should still use TLS/HTTPS.
just because you’re hosting the app locally doesn’t mean the JS embedded in the page is safe. HTTPS will ensure that all your traffic is encrypted so only you and the server knows what it contains.
if the JS on the page is unsafe then HTTPS wouldn’t help right? The JS could scrape all the info client-side and extradite it.
AFAIK the reason why you’d use HTTPS on your LAN is if you’re afraid of middleman attacks in your LAN, like a malicious device that pretends to be the internet router.
it would if it’s importing something else.
let’s say your site is on https://app.home.com/ and your js is locally sourced. then that JS was injected with an import from http://vuln.evil.com/.
I’m pretty sure your browser would block it based on the fact that the document domain is using HTTPS and HSTS would block it based on not using HTTPS.
I think. never really tried this out tbh.
Wait what does embedded JS have to do with it? If it’s HTTPS the JS will still run and still be able to do whatever it did before AFAIK.
Adding to this, the only time I dont use HTTPS/TLS is when I am accessing localhost, prior to moving a service to a subdomain to give it HTTPS/TLS…
Always use HTTPS. Especially if you’re using your services on mobile.
Imagine you’re on your friend’s WiFi, and you disconnect from your net bird/tailscale/wireguard connection to your self hosted network… Any and all mobile apps that require that secure connection, is going to attempt requests to your internal services and sending auth/session token details along the requests.
A bad actor on your friend’s WiFi network, could, in theory, capture these requests and now you’re at the mercy of how well those services are written.
This all may sound a bit paranoid, but it is what we are trying to mitigate here.
It’s not even that hard to imagine, this is exactly what rogue wifi access points do. It’s surprisingly common for wifi access at places like coffee shops to be compromised and used to silently conduct these types of attacks. The people that set them up are not very knowledgeable and also they don’t ever check up on them as long as they keep working.
This is also why you want to enable HSTS on top of your HTTPS, so that rogue requests to downgrade the connection to plain HTTP are ignored.
Another good idea is to place all the services that should only be accessed over VPN only in private DNS (home LAN DNS and the VPN’s DNS), never in public DNS. A simple and effective way of doing that is to place them on a deep subdomain like
*.private.example.comrather than*.example.com. That way if your VPN drops when you try to resolve those subdomains you don’t get any response anymore and there’s no connection for the rogue wifi to hijack.Yep! Definitely don’t add any of your internal domains on public DNS services. Be careful requesting SSL certs for the child subdomains too. They will show up on transparency logs like on shodan.io. Use internal DNS, and wild card certs for these things. And obviously, do not expose your ports publically.
I’m not sure I understand this. If I’m on my phone and connect using wire guard or teleport and I’m connected to a public wifi, I don’t understand the risks. Can you explain them? Thanks, I genuinely don’t understand. I thought encrypted tunnels were safe?
Sometimes your connection might not work correctly, and you’re not connected to your secure network. Like how VPNs will have kill switches (prevents you from accessing the Internet if the connection to the VPN isn’t successful) to prevent leaks during those spotty connections. Without HTTPS, during those spotty connection times, you’re sending your auth/session details plain-text on an unsafe network.
Yes, always use HTTPS, even on local networks if there ever are more than one device on the network.
The way to handle services with/without HTTPS is to put everything behind a reverse proxy that automatically handles certificates. Since you’re using NGINX, you can try setup certbot, or switch to something like Caddy that has certificate handling built in. If you have all your Docker containers on one server, you can look at Traefik.
Question: I have a remote VPS running Caddy, which sends requests through a WireGuard tunnel to my OPNsense router, which then forwards them on to my VMs running Nextcloud and Jellyfin. Is it possible to use the same certificate locally? Whenever I access the services locally, I have to use http because apparently generating a self-signed certificate locally conflicted with the Caddy-generated certbot certificate.
Probably if you move Caddy to the local VM and then forward the ports 80 and 443 to the VPS through WG. So the VPS receives all requests, but instead of going through Caddy first and then through WG, they go straight through WG and into Caddy on your local VM. Then you can access Caddy both locally and externally through the VPS-WG tunnel.
I have no experience setting this up though, I don’t have a VPS in front of my lab.
wow, I didnt expect so many replies, thank you guys so much! Really Cool to see the fediverse this alive. Ill definitely dive in to all your suggestion and try to get ssl running on all services just to be safe. I think I had this figured out back when I used npm but now that i use the netbird proxy service to link to the services directly, Im not sure how a proxy like npm or caddy or traefik would fit into the equation. But I’m sure ill find something with some trial and error
So, HTTPS prevents people on the network from hijacking the connection or spying on what you do with the website or your passwords. If you have a VPN and no evil devices inside your network you are likely fine, and many things don’t need HTTPS-level of safety.
That said, browsers make using HTTP almost unusable nowadays, because over the internet you really want your connection to not be hyjacked, and almost nobody self-hosts (sadly).
I would reccommend to set up a reverse proxy to do https for all services you host, even if you only use it via lan/vpn. Adding a new service then becomes just hosting it over HTTP, and have your reverse proxy converting the connection to HTTPS.
If you have a domain, you can request a wildcard cert from let’s encrypt and use that also for internal domains (they don’t need to be reachable from the public internet, but you might need to expose the ACME challenge file).
If you want to learn a lot about certificates you can go the self-signed route, but you’ll have to install the certificate on every device you use to access your services (guests will get huge warnings when trying to access your pages, if you give them access to them). Once set up it’s more flexible though, and if you configure your dns server you can have whatever domain you want, even nonexistent or unavailable ones.
Most (if not all) reverse proxies will allow you to add a certificate for your sites locally. I run everything over wireguard when I’m outside my network, and have NGINX Proxy Manager for all my routing and certificate needs. Works flawlessly so far.
Yes, because an attacker already in your network will be able to view non SSL traffic.
I even have my unRAID endpoints using https. You can do self signed, or you can use something like let’s encrypt to do it for you. I use wildcard certs as any signed certs with the full subdomain can expose what services I host internally (since signed certificate provisioning is, by design, a public process).
If nothing’s exposed and it’s all behind Netbird, you don’t strictly need it. I still would, because apps like Vaultwarden’s web vault won’t load without a secure context. A wildcard cert via DNS challenge is a one-time setup. Everything else is optional.
Some features like copying to your clipboard will only work if you’re using https
Yes especially since https is to setup and maintain.
Yes you do.
First of all, there are services that will refuse to work properly on http only. Specially if you want an SSO like authelia, will not work over http
Second, modern browsers will complain when using plain http if the website has forms to fill or passwords to write … very annoying, but it’s the way it is.
Third, having the “this site is not secure” broken lock is not very nice for users. At best they might complain, at worse they will get used to “unsecured” websites and .ight end up easier prey for fake sites in the future. Yes I mean wife or kids. These are things normal users should not see as normal…
Last, if you expose anything to the web, please never ever do that without proper https with certificates from let’s encrypt.
Even though it’s not strictly required if you’re only using your services over your local network or a VPN, your browser won’t know that’s what you’re doing. The security warnings got so incredibly annoying for me that I switched to using https on everything.
There are also some specific web features that only work over https (including some optional upgrades needed for Nextcloud iirc)
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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CA (SSL) Certificate Authority DNS Domain Name Service/System IoT Internet of Things for device controllers SSO Single Sign-On TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (‘Jabber’) for open instant messaging nginx Popular HTTP server
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