Selfhosted

40173 readers

638 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.

Resources:

selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
awesome-selfhosted software
awesome-sysadmin resources
Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Do I Need to Harden SSH over Tor? (infosec.pub)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

27 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/10908807

TLDR:

If I use SSH as a Tor hidden service and do not share the public hostname of that service, do I need any more hardening?

Full Post:

I am planning to setup a clearnet service on a server where my normal "in bound" management will be over SSH tunneled through Wireguard. I also want "out of bound" management in case the incoming ports I am using get blocked and I cannot access my Wireguard tunnel. This is selfhosted on a home network.

I was thinking that I could have an SSH bastion host as a virtual machine, which will expose SSH as a a hidden service. I would SSH into this VM over Tor and then proxy SSH into the host OS from there. As I would only be using this rarely as a backup connection, I do not care about speed or convenience of connecting to it, only that it is always available and secure. Also, I would treat the public hostname like any other secret, as only I need access to it.

Other than setting up secure configs for SSH and Tor themselves, is it worth doing other hardening like running Wireguard over Tor? I know that extra layers of security can't hurt, but I want this backup connection to be as reliable as possible so I want to avoid unneeded complexity.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 38 points 7 months ago (20 children)

If you don't have any good reason not to, always set your SSH server to only authenticate with keys.

Anything else is irrelevant.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (19 children)

If you don't have any good reason not to

Spoiler alert: you don't.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 7 months ago (7 children)

This is the internet. If you poke the bear, somebody will come-up with a completely reasonable use case of password authentication that happened once somewhere on the world.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Easy. I have servers that are only available on my local network and lots of different devices that I MIGHT want to use to access those servers. I haven't bothered to make sure my key is on EVERY SINGLE DEVICE and some of them, I might not actually even WANT my key on as they're not terribly well secured and they might leave my house (my Windows gaming laptop I haven't used in six months comes to mind).

But for cloud accessible servers... yeah.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You know you're allowed (some might even say supposed) to have different keys for different machines. They're basically free to generate and take up to no space.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I use a different key for every device I need to connect to.

So my phone has separate keys for each SSH server and so does my desktop and laptop.

It's not the most convenient thing in the world but it's not too bad.

Most of the keys are without passphrase but the keys I use to connect to my VPS for example absolutely have a passphrase.

load more comments (5 replies)

load more comments (16 replies)