Specifically from the standpoint of protecting against common and not-so-common exploits.
I understand the concept of a reverse proxy and how works on the surface level, but do any of the common recommendations (npm, caddy, traefik) actually do anything worthwhile to protect against exploit probes and/or active attacks?
Npm has a “block common exploits” option but I can’t find anything about what that actually does, caddy has a module to add crowdsec support which looks like it could be promising but I haven’t wrapped my head around it yet, and traefik looks like a massive pain to get going in the first place!
Meanwhile Bunkerweb actually looks like it’s been built with robust protections out of the box, but seems like it’s just as complicated as traefik to setup, and DNS based Let’s Encrypt requires a pro subscription so that’s a no-go for me anyway.
Would love to hear people’s thoughts on the matter and what you’re doing to adequately secure your setup.
Edit: Thanks for all of your informative replies, everyone. I read them all and replied to as many as I could! In the end I’ve managed to get npm working with crowdsec, and once I get cloudflare to include the source IP with the requests I think I’ll be happy enough with that solution.
Very useful insights, thanks.
I do currently have external stuff running via a Cloudflare tunnel (which is why I need DNS based LE certs for the internal proxy) but I don’t know if it’s setup correctly (beyond doing basic reverse proxying) and the admin backend for it feels like massive overkill for a home setup. Plus with Immich I run into the issue of a) dire warnings about it being in active dev and potentially insecure and b) filesize limits making away-from-home backups difficult.
I could well be over thinking the whole thing.