Hi all, I’m running a small website off of a raspberry pi in my house. I have opened ports 80 and 443 and connected my IP to a domain. I’m pretty confident in my security for my raspberry pi (no password ssh, fail2ban, nginx. Shoutout networkchuck.). However, I am wondering if by exposing my ports to the raspberry pi, I am also exposing those same ports to other devices in my home network, for example, my PC. I’m just a bit unsure if port forwarding to an internal IP would also expose other internal IP’s or if it only goes to the pi. If you are able to answer or have any other comments about my setup, I would appreciate your comment. Thanks!
I have my services proxied through nginx and behind cloudflares free tier. That way I don’t have to worry about my IP getting exposed and opening myself up to DDOS/DOS attacks, which is a genuine threat if you do things that piss people off (I’m an admin on a popular minecraft server).
You can use Cloudflare Tunnels too, so that you don’t even need to port forward.
It’s 2023, the threat is there regardless if you piss anyone off. We’re all commodities that can/will be exploited for capitalistic gain.
I looked into nginx for minecraft, but minecraft doesn’t use http headers, so I’d have to open minecraft ports on the router. Would this alleviate that? What’s the difference between this setup and using something like a cloudflare tunnel? Obviously, there is still some reliance on Cloudflare.
You are probably going to be ok unless someone really wants to hack you. The LastPass hack that exposed passwords of millions of people started from an open port in the home network of one of their engineers.
If you want to be somewhat safer, you could try something like the cloudflare tunnel thing to proxy your home network through their server.
Honestly depends on what he’s hosting… Services like shodan are constantly scanning the web and are trying to see what is actually running in the machine.
If he’s serving something that’s vulnerable and has rce it won’t take too long for him to get automatically pwned.
We’ve seen this with the hafnium Echange vulnerability and all known vulnerable public facing web apps that used log4j.
Regarding the LastPass breach, the second part of the breach was using a very outdated version of Plex. Chances are high that his home machine was already hacked by other malicious actors.
If you port forward to your Pi, only your Pi will be exposed. But, if your Pi gets pwned, it can in turn attack anything next to it. Safest is to isolate the Pi on it’s own subnet or a DMZ if your router has the functionality.
Of note, many home ISPs block standard server ports like 80 and 443. You might need to use non standard ports like 8080 and 8443
You could put the pi on its own subnet. That way if it’s hacked, the rest of the network is protected. Just make sure your router admin interface doesn’t answer on that subnet.
You could put the pi on its own subnet.
This option is sometimes referred to as a ‘DMZ’ and may be supported by the router. Also look for VLAN options.
DMZ in essence means “forward ALL ports” to X. You should only DMZ a host that you know is very secure as its attack surface is significantly increased. If you need just one or two services open, best to not use DMZ
You should be fine. If you are using port forwarding the inbound traffic on that port should be sent only to the system you have designated. The only way that changes is if the system (rpi in this case) is operating as a reverse proxy. Even then net side should only see the proxy.
The biggest vulnerability would be the system that you are forwarding to, and if that system is a reverse proxy whatever the backend systems are. Make sure everything is fully updated/patched and that you trust the services that you are running and you should be good.
My only comment on your setup would be to make sure you fully understand what you are doing and more importantly, why. Cargo Culting is a bad way to admin. Good questions like yours are a good way to start.
The port forward only forwards to a single device so you aren’t exposing your PC (directly anyway). Sounds like you have the pi good and secured but if you wanted to add another layer you could segment it out into a DMZ or its own VLAN. That way if something did happen with it an attacker couldn’t move laterally inside your network.
Realistically though you’re in good shape.
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