Hey everyone,
I’m looking for some insights to confirm if my home server’s security is up to par against common cyber threats. Here’s a brief rundown of my setup:
-
External Ports: I’ve limited external access to only three ports:
- Port 80 and 443 for Nginx-Proxy-Manager
- Port 51829 for Wireguard VPN
-
Hardware:
- I’m running a Raspberry Pi 4 and a Mini PC.
- Both are connected to the router via Ethernet.
-
Network:
- NPM is set up for reverse proxy.
- SSL is enabled for local DNS - to avoid memorizing IP addresses.
-
Docker:
- All applications are containerized and use
network_mode: bridge.
- All applications are containerized and use
-
Internet-Facing Services:
- Only two services are exposed to the internet:
- A media server
- The Wireguard VPN
- I’m using free DuckDNS domains, configured with NPM.
- Only two services are exposed to the internet:
-
Firewall:
- Currently, I’m relying on the default settings of Debian 12 and the Docker engine.
- I haven’t set up any specific firewall rules.
Given this setup, do you think my security measures are sufficient? I’m particularly curious about the risks associated with my Docker containers and the exposed ports. Any recommendations or best practices you could share would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance for your help!
Put your external facing services behind the VPN, or at least put them in a separate VLAN that’s firewalled in such a way that they can’t reach the rest of the network if they become compromised.
Can you give me some pointers on how to get started on accomplishing this? Maybe some app names or tutorials?
Setup automatic security updates with unattended-upgrades. I don’t know alot about your security expect for the fact that outdated applications are more vulnerable.
Fail2ban is useful to set up.
Seems like your edge server is acting as a proxy for a media server on some other host on your LAN.
You want to make sure that the media server software is setup securely, patched, and properly isolated from anything else in LAN should that become compromised. Proxy closes off a lot of attack vectors but not application vulnerabilities. The Lastpass hack happened because of some vulnerability in an employees home plex server.
Exposed parts can be messy if you’re not used to them.
Easiest option would be to have a VPS set up as a VPN server with the ports you need forwarded to it, and your applications connecting to it. If you don’t want the extra maintenance, Cloudflare tunnels for you. Racknerd boxes are $1/month.
Docker containers run as root by default. Either change the flag or switch to podman if you don’t need root access for your containers.
Time to get a router compatible with OpenWRT/OPNsense.
There probably are better ways, but I’m totoo at the moment to recollect.
