Minimizing my selfhosted attack surface

Dugite-Code

(updated 2021.03.23)

I'm always fairly wary of opening my selfhosted services up to the internet, just how sure am I that the developer has done the right due-diligence? Thankfully it's relatively simple to at least limit parts of a service accessible to the open internet with Nginx and allow and deny options.

Update

Note: If you want a docker container to access a protected service you will have to set the subnet in your docker-compose file as below:

networks:
  node-red-network:
    ipam:
      config:
        - subnet: "172.16.0.0/24"

Update 2

A more generic change you can do is set the default address pools in docker's /etc/docker/daemon.json file. You then just have to whitelist 172.16.0.0/16 subnets

{
  "default-address-pools":
  [
    {"base":"172.16.0.0/16","size":24}
  ]
}

First you should store this in a file, that way you can then include it multiple times, this will make it trivial to update in the future. Create the file include_whitelist in your nginx folder, adding your own allow options between satisfy any; and deny all;.

satisfy any;

# allow localhost
allow 127.0.0.1;

# allow a single address
# allow 000.000.000.000;

# allow LAN network
allow 192.168.0.0/24;

# allow WLAN network
allow 192.168.2.0/24;

# allow VPN network
allow 10.1.4.0/24;

# drop rest of the world
deny all;

You then have to include the file in your nginx config. Here I am using TT-RSS as an example, Note that I'm excluding the API and the public.php by having it in a separate location block without including the include_whitelist. This allows me to keep accessing TT-RSS on my mobile phone through the mobile application.

  location ^~ /tt-rss/ {
      include /etc/nginx/include_whitelist;

      access_log off;
      proxy_set_header Host $host;
      proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
      proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8280/tt-rss/;

  }

  location ^~ /tt-rss/api {

      access_log off;
      proxy_set_header Host $host;
      proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
      proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8280/tt-rss/api;

  }

  location ^~ /tt-rss/public.php {

      proxy_set_header Host $host;
      proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
      proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8280/tt-rss/public.php;

  }

For Node-Red I wanted an API endpoint for Tasker on my phone. Thankfully this is just as easy to define in Node-red as it is in nginx. In Node-Red open your GET node and just add another folder.

Add and extra folder to your Node-Red endpoints

An example of the Node-Red nginx configuration. Again just like the TT-RSS example above, I have excluded an api subdirectory by having a separate location block.

  location ^~ /node-red/ {
    include /etc/nginx/include_whitelist;

    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    proxy_http_version 1.1;
    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:1880/node-red/;
  }

  location ^~ /node-red/api/ {
    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    proxy_http_version 1.1;
    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:1880/node-red/api/;
  }

Now only your API endpoints are globally available. If like me you use a firewall, throwing a convenient geo-block up in front you can lower the exposure a bit more.

Update

Update 2

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