Step 3: Install nginx on the VPS and configure it as reverse proxy to your home address. Something like this:
server {
listen 80;
server_name example.org; # your real domain name you want people to use to access your website
location / {
proxy_pass http://home-dynamic-dns.freeprovider... # replace with your home server IP or Dynamic DNS.
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_redirect off;
}
}
Step 4: Point your A record of example.org to your VPS.
http {
(...)
real_ip_header X-Real-IP;
set_real_ip_from x.x.x.x; # Replace with the VPS IP address.
}
This will make sure only the VPS is allowed to override the real IP of the client.
Step 6: Once your setup works you may increase your security by using SSL / disabling plain HTTP setup letsencrypt in both servers to get valid SSL certificates for real domain and the dynamic DNS one.
Proceed to disable plain text / HTTP traffic. To do this simply remove the entire server { listen 80 section on both servers. You should replace them with server { listen 443 ssl; so it listens only for HTTPs traffic.
Step 7: set your home router to allow incoming traffic in port 443 and forward it into the home server;
Step 8: set the home server's firewall to only accept traffic coming from outside the LAN subnet on port 443 and if it comes from the VPS IP. Drop everything else.
Another alternative to this it to setup a Wireguard tunnel between your home server and the VPS and have the reverse proxy send the traffic through that tunnel (change proxy_pass to the IP of the home server inside the tunnel like proxy_pass http://10.0.0.2). This has two advantages: 1) you don't need to setup SSL at your home server as all the traffic will flow encrypted over the tunnel and 2) will not require to open a local port for incoming traffic on the home network... however it also has two drawbacks: you'll need a better VPS because WG requires extra processing power and 2) your home server will have to keep the tunnel connected and working however it will fail. Frankly I wouldn't bother to setup the tunnel as your home server will only accept traffic from the VPS IP so you won't gain much there in terms of security.
Say someone wants to take your service down, you've got 500Mbits line at home ISP, and 10Gbits on your VPS; they sends 1Gbits of traffic to your VPS, your VPS happily tries to forward 1Gbits, fully saturating your home ISP line. Now you're knocked offline.
Say someone discovers the actual IP, dropping traffic from anything else other than the VPS doesn't help if they just, again, flood your line with 500Mbits of traffic. The traffic still flows from the ISP to your gateway before they could be dropped.
Say someone wants to perform SQL injection on your website, there is no WAF in this stack to prevent that.
Say someone abuses a remote code execution bug from the application you're hosting in order to create a reverse shell to get into your system, this complex stack introduced doesn't protect that.
You've provided a comprehensive guide, and I don't want to single you out for being helpful, but I must ask: What problem does this solve, and does OP actually have the problem this stack can solve? From the replies we've seen in this thread, OP doesn't have sufficient understanding to the full scope of the situation. Prescribing a well intended solution might be helpful, but it gives a false sense of security that doesn't really help with the full picture.
You aren't wrong but the things you're mentioned are always an issue, even if he was running the entire website on a VPS.
VPS happily tries to forward 1Gbits, fully saturating your home ISP line. Now you’re knocked offline.
Yeah, but at the same time any VPS provider worth it will have some kind os firewalling in place and block a DDoS like that one. People usually don't ever notice this but big providers actually have those measures in place and do block DDoS attacks without their customers ever noticing. If they didn't hackers would just overrun a few IPs and take all the bandwidth the provider has and take their all their customers down that way.
I'm not saying anyone should actually rely only on the VPS provider ability to block such things but it's still there.
The OP should obviously take a good read at nftables rate limiting options and fail2ban. This should be implemented both at the VPS and his home server to help mitigate potential DDoS attacks.
Say someone abuses a remote code execution bug from the application you’re hosting in order to create a reverse shell to get into your system, this complex stack introduced doesn’t protect that.
It doesn't and it was never supposed to mitigate that as the OP only asked for a way to reverse proxy / hide is real IP.
You could try Tailscale? It creates a secure tunnel to your server so you don't have to connect it to the internet. Not sure if that checks all your boxes though.
Then you can't "hide" your server IP without a VPS/VPN set up. Maybe I'm not understanding what you're asking? Your public IP is visible to any machine you connect to and that includes Cloudflare's servers.
Are you worried about copyright or something? This isn't legal advice, but I doubt they give a shit unless you're hosting content illegally for a large number of people. Obviously, only take the risk if you are comfortable with the potential consequences where you live.
Privacy to disconnect your identity from the service? There is no solution to this. Full stop. Even with Tor, the state backed acronym entities will figure it out if you get on their radar.
If your objective is to keep your service online, you’re going to be hard pressed to find cost effective alternatives… Commercial solutions are expensive, like, “if you have to ask about the price, you can’t afford it” expensive.
Alternatively, you can try to roll your own by having many many proxy servers yourself… but if you’ve got a target on your back, you’ll never have enough instances; DDOS-as-a-Service is much cheaper than the amount of reverse proxies required to keep your service online.
There’s probably other use cases, but chances are, you’d still be hard pressed to find a solution that’s cost effective.
I would like to access to my server only trough the proxy, like if I put my real IP I end up with nothing, but if I put the proxy IP it show me my server
DDoS? It’s cheaper to hire botnets to attack than to defend. You’d most likely still be knocked off even just by the amount of traffic that leaks through your proxy before the VM gets cut off at the data centre. Specifically: it is much more likely that data centres will give higher thresholds before null routing your VM than your residential ISP would be wiling to tolerate.
Brute force on shell? SQL injection? Remote shell execution? Deploying the extra layer will not protect you from these as your own proxy will not give you WAF.
It is always important to know why you’re doing something, before anyone can prescribe a solution.
Most people are under the impression that their IP being public is somehow super dangerous, and that “hackers will attack me” if it ever gets out. So likely “all the attacks against my entire network.”
Edit: Secondary thought, they legitimately have unsecured endpoints on their IP, and are hoping no one will notice if they aren’t handing out their IP to others. Still incorrect though.
If I want to host my services to the internet, I need to open a port in my firewall nah? is that not a bit risky than only allow access from the address of the data center to use this open port?
You do not strictly need to open a port -- tunnelling through another server could be a solution, but let's park this for a moment.
What you are describing as "open a port in my firewall" is actually many smaller parts, some key ones that may be relevant are:
(Firewall) Telling your gateway to not drop traffic when someone outside is request to connect to the specified port; and
(Port Forwarding) Telling your gateway to forward traffic from that port to a specific computer's specific port within the network (i.e.: your computer, port 80)
(Running a service) Having a service (say for example, a web server) running on the specified computer's specific port answering requests
All three things (amongst others that's not immediately relevant here) must be properly setup for any network request to happen. What do I mean by that? I can have a port not drop traffic (i.e.: firewall down). When someone from outside of my network trying to access the port, they'd get to my router, but nothing happens because there's no where for the packet to go. I can have my firewall down, and port forwarding enabled, but the web server isn't running. When someone from outside of my network trying to access the port, they'd get to my router, get forwarded to my computer, but because the web server isn't running, nothing happens. Someone from outside of my network can only gain access to my service (and only that service) only when all three are setup and working together.
"But what about the hackers?"
Yes, the untrusted networks, such as the internet, could be a bad place with people with bad intentions. There are many different things they could do to make things undesirable; let's explore some of them together.
Say we want to run an instance of Lemmy using a new experimental server software (i.e.: not the official Lemmy server). Now, unfortunately, some racist people decided to come and make racist posts on our instance. A tunnel / proxy doesn't solve this. Instead, we have to ban their accounts. It may not seem much, and it was completely innocuous to our system, but we've just dealt with our first attack.
One of those racist person happens to be the "scary hacker" type, so they came back and try to brute force our admin account's password to unban themselves. This is not too bad, but we need to address this somehow. A tunnel / proxy doesn't solve this; but something like Fail2Ban might be able to look at the login failures and put a temporary IP ban on the attacker.
They're back! And this time, they decide to repeatedly hammer the search function, thereby taking all the resources from our database, so our instance cannot serve other users. A tunnel / proxy doesn't solve this; but some rate limiting configurations in the server application might help.
They're not happy about getting rate limited there. So this time, they decided to continuously post garbage to our instance, not even normal requests, just connect to our web server, and spam AAAAAAAAAAAAAA..... non stop, at such a quick pace that it fully saturates our network connection, and we cannot do anything else on the network. A tunnel / proxy doesn't solve this; we'd need to block them from the firewall. This is not entirely true; blocking them at the firewall doesn't solve the problem, because the traffic still goes from the ISP to the firewall, which will still be saturated before the firewall could drop the traffic, but to use as an example it narrates a potential problem well enough.
They're angry now, and they pay a few bucks to botnets to have many many many thousands of infected computers to spam AAAAAAAAA... non stop at our service. Again, a tunnel / proxy doesn't solve this; we'd need to have something smarter than just our firewall and individually ban the IP addresses. This is where we'd need the professionals with typically commercial offerings.
It could escalade the other direction. Instead of attacking with aim to take the service down, they could do other damaging things. Say they found a problem with our server software. Instead of giving the /post/<postid> a numeric id, they can do something fancy like /post/1 AND 1 ==1; UPDATE users SET banned = FALSE WHERE username = 'racist-user' and unban themselves. A tunnel / proxy doesn't solve this; but a Web Application Firewall (WAF) might.
Now it escalades more. Through a complex chain of intentionally malformed image uploaded to the instance, the image resizer attempting to resize the image, which gets tripped over by the malicious image, which causes a remote code execution, which they use to create a remote access trojan (RAT) shell so they can connect to our server and run commands. This is usually the "big bad" that most people are scared of... someone from outside of their network having access to their system and thus gains the ability to extract their documents or encrypt their photos etc. A tunnel / proxy doesn't solve this; but a WAF or an anti-virus on the server itself might.
Through these albeit simplified but lengthy exploration, we see that none of these would actually be addressed by a tunnel / proxy. There are other possible attacks, and they'd require other solutions.
So, goes back to what I was saying earlier... it is important to know why you're trying to do something. Blindly prescribing tunnel / proxy doesn't actually solve the problem.
Honestly, if it’s just a small, personal project, just use common sense and take some basic precautions (e.g. use a firewall, use NGINX instead of serving Wordpress directly, etc.).
Note that CloudFlare doesn’t protect you from everything either - it only provides some very specific services. A rudimentary level of caching images being the most common one a free account level would be able to use.