I have been thinking about self-hosting my personal photos on my linux server. After the recent backdoor was detected I’m more hesitant to do so especially because i’m no security expert and don’t have the time and knowledge to audit my server. All I’ve done so far is disabling password logins and changing the ssh port. I’m wondering if there are more backdoors and if new ones are made I can’t respond in time. Appreciate your thoughts on this for an ordinary user.

  • Amju Wolf@pawb.socialEnglish
    41·
    8 months ago

    …which shouldn’t be an issue in any way. For extra obscurity (and convenience) you can use wildcard certs, too.

      • Amju Wolf@pawb.social
        2·
        8 months ago

        Have been for a long time. You just have to use the DNS validation. But you should do that (and it’s easy) if you want to manage “internal” domains anyway.

        • delirious_owl
          21·
          8 months ago

          Oh, yeah, idk. Giving API access to a system to modify DNS is too risky. Or is there some provider you recommend with a granular API that only gives the keys permission to modify TXT and .well-known (eg so it can’t change SPF TXT records or, of course, any A records, etc)

          • Amju Wolf@pawb.socialEnglish
            2·
            8 months ago

            What you can (and absolutely should) do is DNS delegation. On your main domain you delegate the _acme-challenge. subdomains with NS records to your DNS server that will do cert generation (and cert generation only). You probably want to run Bind there (since it has decent and fast remote access for changing records and other existing solutions). You can still split it with separate keys into different zones (I would suggest one key per certificate, and splitting certificates by where/how they will be used).

            You don’t even need to allow remote access beyond the DNS responses if you don’t want to, and that server doesn’t have anything to do with anything else in your infrastructure.

            • delirious_owl
              1·
              8 months ago

              Ok, so no API at all. Its the internal DNS server itself that runs certbot and makes the changes locally?

              • Amju Wolf@pawb.socialEnglish
                2·
                8 months ago

                Yes, that’s one option. Then you only have to distribute the certificates and keys.

                Or you allow remote access to that DNS server (Bind has a secure protocol for this), do the challenge requests and cert generation on some other machine. Depends on what is more convenient for you (the latter is better if you have lots of machines/certs).

                Worst case if someone compromises that DNS server they can only generate certificates but not change your actual valuable records because these are not delegated there.