Selfhosted

By not making them publicly accessible. With Wireguard there's really no reason.

Setup service to be active on a subnet, enable Wireguard to VPN into the subnet and use the services.

So there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail2ban which helps already to some degree.

But what are you trying to prevent? You have your services in a docker container, hopefully not running as root, which already makes it difficult to break out even if through a bug someone would be able to get access to the docker container.

I mean its not like your stuff is very important for someone to break in like the pentagon, you probably just have some photos from your phone on it, some lights can be switched on and off and some temperatures read.

I'm not trying to say that you should not care about it but I'm trying to figure out what your threat model is.

Check out crowdsec. Like fail2ban, but with crowdsourced lists on top.

I would put this stuff behind VPN.

We expose about a dozen services to the open web. Haven't bothered with something like Authentik yet, just strong passwords.

We use a solid OPNSense Firewall config with rather fine-grained permissions to allow/forbid traffic to the respective VMs, between the VMs, between VMs and the NAS, and so on.

We also have a wireguard tunnel to home for all the services that don't need to be available on the internet publicly. That one also allows access to the management interface of the firewall.

In OPNSense, you get quite good logging capabilities, should you suspect someone is trying to gain access, you'll be able to read it from there.

I am also considering setting up Prometheus and Grafana for all our services, which could point out some anomalies, though that would not be the main usecase.

Lastly, I also have a server at a hoster for some stuff that is not practical to host at home. The hoster provided a very rudimentary firewall, so I'm using that to only open necessary ports, and then Fail2Ban to insta-ban IPs for a week on the first offense. Have also set it up so they get banned on Cloudflare's side, so before another malicious request ever reaches me.

Have not had any issues, ever.

Auth portal for VPN tunnell -> Authelia -> fail2ban -> VLAN with services only.

ELK stack monitors the LAN. (Including VLAN)

Keep that VLAN segmented. You're good unless you're a DOGE employee, then I'd recommend quite a bit more security.

I've tried different approaches with fail2ban, crowdsec, VPNs, etc. What I settled on is to divide the data of my services in two categories: confidential and "I can live with it leaking".

The ones that host confidential data is behind a VPN and has some basic monitoring on them.

The ones that are out in the public are behind a WAF from cloudflare with pretty restrictive rules.

Yes, cloudflare suck etc., but the value of stopping potential attacks before they reach your services is hard to match.

Just keep in mind: you need layers of different security measures to protect your services (such as backups, control of network traffic, monitoring and detection, and so on).

Wazuh

Active responses are like fail2ban but better

I've half ass thought about this but never have tried to actually self host. If you have access to all devices, why not just use your own self signed certificates to encrypt everything and require the certificate for all connections? Then there is never a way to log in or connect right? The only reason for any authentication is to make it possible to use any connection to dial into your server. So is that a bug or a feature. Maybe I'm missing something fundamental in this abstract concept that someone will tell me?

So among my services I self host, a few need to be publicly accessible for work. For those I wish to remain private, Caddy only allows private IP ranges, plus then Authelia as auth which is set to 30 days. There is then the login of each service behind Authelia as well. It's as good as it needs to be for my needs.

If I were only self hosting private services, then as others have said, I would put all access through a VPN.

Edit: I should add that of course the private services are then only accessed via VPN to the router (part of the private IP ranges). Caddy as reverse proxy also obfuscates the subdomain names I use.

Some of these you're already doing, but writing a complete* list. *almost garuanteed not to be complete, suggestions welcome

1. Have everything behind the same reverse proxy, so that you have only one endpoint to worry about. Run it through ssllabs or similar to check your config.
2. On your reverse proxy, add one or more layers of authentication if possible. Many possibilities here: If one app supports client certificates, while another has limited capabilities, you could probably tie together something where IPs are whitelisted to the ither services based on that certificate auth.
3. Geoblock all countries you won't be accessing from
4. crowdsec is pretty nice, this detects/blocks threats. kinda like fail2ban but on steroids.
5. if you use one of those 5$/month VPSes, with a VPN tunnel to your backend services, that adds one layer of "if it's compromised, they're not in your house".

lastly consider if these things need to be publically avilable at all. I'm happy with 95% of my services only being available through Tailscale (mesh VPN, paid service with good enough free tier, open source+free alternatives available), and I've got tailscale on all my devices