As the title says ive started running webmin. And i wanna know if its safe for me to reverse proxy (with 2fa) or should i just use tailscale or ssh to access it.
I probably wouldn’t expose it, while I don’t think it’s been a problem in the past, with LLMs being used to find vulnerabilities so much in the past few months it seems prudent to do everything you can reasonably do to secure things.
Tailscale is so easy to use it seems worth the bit of extra hassle.
Short answer: No.
Long answer: Hell, no!
I don’t think it’s ever been considered safe to be publicly accessible.
It is almost always a bad idea to place a management interface on the internet. No level of strong password and multifactor auth will protect against an unauthenticated RCE which every language will get, including Perl.
Absolutely stick it behind tailscale.OK, but if your threat landscape is someone burning 2 zero days (one tail scale, one webmin) you aren’t likely to be posting here for answers you will have security people on call.
Geofencing is always a good option for remote access, no point in allowing someone from Spain to login when you are in Germany.
Why would you want to expose it to the web in the first place? In a homelab scenario, you’re the only one who needs access, so putting it behind a VPN comes at zero convenience or monetary cost.
My homelab stuff I like to be able to access from places that take all my free time (like work), making things accessible is a bit of a requirement for me.
That’s fair, but I still can’t see how a VPN connection makes your stuff less accessible - at least to you.
Just by making it so I can’t access from a system I don’t control. Like say I need to retrieve a document from my house, but I’m in a SCIF, or a waiting room, or anywhere else I wouldn’t have my personal device, it’s super useful to just connect to something like Nextcloud and pull it down.
Is tail scale really that much more secure than reverse proxy and auth control?
Yes, it inherently is. Authentication/encryption happens as the very first thing at the network level, before anything resembling a service becomes accessible. This is fundamentally different than for example a web interface, which needs to present “the Web page” to allow the user to log in, which might involve multiple individual parts that can already have a 0-day.
As a more direct comparison: look into historic vulnerabilities between ipsec VPN and SSL VPN. The former is the older technology, the second is more “web like”. The number of serious CVEs for the latter over just some manufacturers (Cisco, fortinet, …) in one year probably beats the number for ipsec in is entire life time.
Going back to Tailscale (or netbird, …): it is one very secure layer which then secures everything. You can have 1 service or 20, same security. If you expose individual services, c you also expose every possible vulnerability of all of them, so all 20 services if that’s what you run.
Makes sense. Its unfortunate though that it presents a hurdle for end users. My users need to hit a webpage and acesss stuff, asking them to connect to a VPN client is too much.
It’s all a matter of what you consider reasonable risk. I also run some specific services exposed where it makes sense (they are designed to do this, think things like home assistant or next cloud or jellyfin), but would never put anything that is used to do server administration public facing (Webmin, Termix, proxmox, that sort of thing). If the purpose of the tool is to perform or allow elevated actions, I run it behind a VPN (yes for me that includes ssh).
There’s also a difference between being randomly port scanned and/or probed, or being actively and personally targeted for some reason. If the second is ever a reasonable threat, that changes what is acceptable dramatically as well.
All good thoughts, thank you
