Comment on How to selfhost with a VPN
possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 21 hours ago
You you setup a proper domain and https for your website instead of having a random IP address and port.
Don’t visit http pages in 2025. It is a major security risk.
LOL. On the scale of risky things I’ve done today, visiting this guy’s http website barely rates a mention.
Someone posts about something they’ve learned and the best you can do is dump on them about whatever thing in order to demonstrate to everyone your superior knowledge.
Everyone starts somewhere.
Let’s be real, this guy has no knowledge. He’s just yet another security parrot who doesn’t even understand the why behind the things they’re regurgitating.
I’m down to help people get https set up. I’m not trying to dunk but rather I’m trying to make the internet a safer place by reducing attacks and mass surveillance.
There’s no security risk viewing this bit of html lmao
How so?
Data send back isn’t validated so someone could tamper with the data. A bad actor could add soke arbittary Javascript plus ISPs have been caught inserting marketing materials into pages.
From a privacy perspective it is also bad as not only does it include your user agent in plain text it doesn’t have any encryption on page contents which allows your ISP to snoop on what you are doing.
All of these reasons are while we moved to https. X.509 certs are free and trivial to setup with Caddy or any other Reverse proxy/web server.
Do you really think someone is going to set up a MITM attack for the dozen people who visit this blog?
Maybe there is, maybe it’s only little. Maybe people browsing should be more aware of where they click on. Either way, this method shouldn’t be used for any sensitive information least a personal cloud. Would be suicidal I guess.
Luckily this website contains no sensitive information and is not a personal cloud.
I’ll bite.
The risk is training people in bad behaviors, and then having those people do stupid things like type in a password.
There’s no password entry on this site, and what people do on other websites is not OPs responsibility.
Oh yes. Pushing personal responsibility to the end user has always been a very effective security strategy.
All those “experts” lecturing you and they don’t even know about man in the middle attacks.
They don’t know that there are active bots searching for HTTP addresses to inject risky code or redirect to malicious sites.
You providing some feedback which may help OP is seen as criticism.
I’m going to be honest I have no idea what you are talking about
Thanks.
It’s my understanding that https provides encryption for the data sent between you and the server. If you’re not sending any sensitive data, then the encryption shouldn’t be necessary.
Don’t get me wrong, encryption is great even when it isn’t necessary. For my demonstration purposes though, I chose not to include it.
I also believe it’s possible to set up HTTPS encryption without a domain name, but it might result in that “we can’t verify the authenticity of this website” warning in web browsers due to using a self-signed certificate.
That is a pretty bad take as all data is sensitive. Https also provides integrity to prevent man in the middle attacks.
And that’s why even static sites like Hugo blogs or even simple pages like the one OP posted should have HTTPS. Source: Studied Distributed Systems at university.
Let’s Encrypt are rolling out IP-based certs, you may wanna follow its development. I’m not sure if it could be used for your forwarded VPN port, but it’d be nice anyhow
Thanks. This is new to me and I’m going to be looking into it.
As I use docker for most of my deploys (as you should for websites exposed to the Internet anyway), I can wholeheartedly recommend traefik for this. Basically it has the functionality of nginx, but supports easy Let’s Encrypt certificates.
Let’s Encrypt are rolling out IP-based certs, you may wanna follow its development. I’m not sure if it could be used for your forwarded VPN port, but it’d be nice anyhow
It shouldn’t be because you’re not actually the owner of the IP address. If any user could get a cert, they could impersonate any other.
I believe encryption helps prevent tampering the data between the server and user too. It should prevent for example, someone MITM the connection and injecting malicious content that tells the user to download malware
No, encryption only protects the confidentiality of data. You need message authentication codes or authenticated encryption to make sure the message hasn’t been transported with. Especially stream ciphers like ChaCha (but also AES in counter mode) are susceptible to malleability attacks, which are super simple yet very dangerous.
Public key crypto, properly implemented, does prevent MITM attacks. TLS does do this, and that’s all that matters here
It shouldn’t be because you’re not actually the owner of the IP address. If any user could get a cert, they could impersonate any other.
They’re ‘shortlived’ 7 day certs, verified using a HTTP challenge. It doesn’t matter who owns the IP, it’s just a matter of who holds the IP.
but it is sensitive data. the webserver can send executable code to the web browser. if it does not that doesn’t matter, what matters is that it can be inserted by a middleman. It’s not like there’s a dedicated person needed to do that, it can just happen automatically.
You can pickup a cheap domain from gen.xyz. The cheapest domain is $0.99 which is pretty affordable especially since you probably are already paying for a internet connection.
Once you have the domain you can point it to your IP and then set port 443 on that address to point to Caddy. On Caddy you can either configure it as a server or use it as a reverse proxy to point to something else.
Security wise I would put all of this on its own vlan with ACLs to control access. If that sounds confusing start with https.
Not that I think you need it for this, but a DynDNS implementation would give you a hostname you can dynamically change to your VPN ip, thus solving the SSL host issue.
It takes two seconds to get https and 10 bucks a year for a domain. Come on
Honestly if one is wanting the lowest cost you can buy a 1.111B class domain from gen.xyz. it is $0.99 a year which is far cheaper than anything I’ve seen.
Even more reason for no excuse
Anyone with the ability to inject or modify packets in the network path between server and client can inject malicious javascript or browser exploits into an unencrypted HTTP TCP stream. The client’s User-Agent and other headers would allow the attacker to customize their attack to target that specific browser version, and compromise the client machine.
It’s my understanding that https provides encryption for the data sent between you and the server. If you’re not sending any sensitive data, then the encryption shouldn’t be necessary.
As others have pointed out, everything can be sensitive. If I’m self hosting nextcloud instance with chat that under British law should check for age… self hosting is now sensitive.
In addition to that, without a secure connection you’re stuck with HTTP/1.1 from 1999 instead of the modern 2 or 3 versions.
I also believe it’s possible to set up HTTPS encryption without a domain name, but it might result in that “we can’t verify the authenticity of this website” warning in web browsers due to using a self-signed certificate.
In addition to that, without a secure connection you’re stuck with HTTP/1.1
That’s not entirely true. A lot of requests, even with https, are send over HTTP/1.1. And this is kinda mind blowing that in 2025 we still rely on something so old and insecure…
Same goes with SMS and the old SS7 protocol from 1970… 2FA SMS is probably the most insecure way to get access to your bank account or what ever service promotes 2FA sms login.
I can’t believe SMS is still used for anything but sure OTP sent in text makes sure my account is secure Mr Bank.
Does that contradict what I said? Sure, HTTP 1 is still widely used, but without TLS you can’t use anything else.
For SMS we don’t have a choice, but if you configure your own web server you do have a choice.
I also believe it’s possible to set up HTTPS encryption without a domain name, but it might result in that “we can’t verify the authenticity of this website” warning in web browsers due to using a self-signed certificate.
Just create your own rootCA and IntermediateCA and sign your certificate with those, put the CA in your trust store of your system and get rid of this self-signed warning on every device and happily access all your service via: *.home.lab or whater ever local domain pleases you.
I’m not installing OP’s CA cert just to view his blog.
Fair point ! Yeah sure if you host a blog online it doesn’t make sense… But if you only self-host your services for family and some friends and access them over VPN, a local CA is actually a privacy respecting choice.
Hosting something on the web (specially self-hosted) without the propre software and hardware is a bad idea in the first place anyway !
Typewar@infosec.pub 1 hour ago
Is it easy to set up https for just an ip address with no domain?