Submitted 1 day ago by possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip to selfhosted@lemmy.world
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhuWay9XJyw
Tried it and it was a breeze to set it up with Caddy!
Problem was… lack of client side support, specially on mobile.
Many (most?) client apps don’t support it.
Use the PWA from your browser, you said? I hope you like Google and using Chrome, because Firefox for Android doesn’t support it 😭
The client cert management is the biggest hurdle with mTLS - I’ve found using a YubiKey to store certs makes it wayy more portable across devices, tho still doesn’t solve the mobile app support issue.
Firefox for Android partially supports PWAs.
Oh, I meant mutual TLS by “it”. Edited.
I was curious so I looked it up… But it should technically work on FF for Android, although there is a bug in the UI.
See:
That’s no bug, mTLS just isn’t implemented on Firefox currently.
There are 2 proposed solutions on that thread:
I tried long ago, but as they said, client side authentication is an issue, most clients do not support it.
I have a system, I use wireguard vpn and for when I want to use a domain name with proper tls (because some client apps require a proper tls connection to work) I set my caddy reverse proxy to only accept request from localhost.
So, there’s a public domain with let’s encrypt TLS, and that domain can only be properly access from local network. Then I connect using vpn to my local network and the client app can access the service over a CA verified TLS.
I set my caddy reverse proxy to only accept request from localhost.
It is a bit more involved but you can actually get a proper cert for localhost stuff, with your domain pointing to an internal ip addr and not risk exposing your public ip and having to open a port.
Signed by a AC?
I had a lot of issues with some apps not allowing self-signed certificates and the app used their own list of allowed AC or something, I was unable to make it allow my own certificates even adding my own root certificate to Android.
From localhost? Did you mean from local network or am I misunderstanding your point here?
Yes, local network I meant.
I haven’t watched the video yet, but it’s generally not worth using mutual TLS if you’re already using a peer-to-peer VPN like Tailscale, as the VPN software is already doing mutual authentication.
The whole point of mTLS is that you dont need to use a VPN
that’s not that same security. an observer will still know that you are connecting over HTTPS to a particular doman/IP, maybe they can also deduce that you are using mTLS, and all your other traffic is not protected by it at all. all the while with wireguard, they can see that it’s wireguard traffic, and where it goes, but anything inside is secret, plus if an app uses unencrypted traffic for some reason (smb, dns, custom and special protocols), wireguard will hide and protect that too.
I get that, but a lot of people are already using a VPN to access their home server or VPS.
This is only true for the connection security. With mTLS you can also authenticate to the webapplication you’re trying to reach. So consider your use-case between von/mtls.
Oh yeah that’s a great point I didn’t consider. Thanks.
I didn’t know what this was until now. It seems like the beta bitwarden app supports this. Would be interesting to get it setup for that.
napkin2020@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
mTLS is so cool, until you find out that almost no clients support it.
WhyAUsername_1@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Immich supports it.