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.
does anyone have an actual horror story about anything happening via an exposed web service? let’s set aside SSH
Counter question
How would you know something went wrong? Do you monitor all the logs? Do you have alerting?
What happens if one service has a serious vulnerability and is compromised? Would an adversary be able to do lateral movement? For that matter are you scanning/checking for vulnerabilities? Do you monitor security tracker?
All of these are things to consider
You might want to consider that backups only protect very old data from ransomware.
Ransomware works by getting on a machine and sitting for several months before activating. During that time, your data is encrypted but you don’t know because when you open a file, your computer decrypts it and shows you what you expect to see. So your backups are working but are saving files that will be lost once the ransom ware activates.
The only solution is to frequently manually verify the backup from a known safe computer. Years ago I looked for something to automate this but didn’t find it. (Something like a raspberry pi with no Internet that can only see the PC it’s testing, compares a known file, then touches the file so it gets backed up again.)
