Hey everyone,
I’m one of the people who still used proton and am now in the process of switching everything and trying to selfhost more.
I sucessfully setup Vaultwarden. I also decided I should move away from having my dockers publicly exposed with nginx reverse proxy and switched everything over to netbird. Im using their proxy feature now to access everything with custom domains and followed a tutorial to setup a bring your own proxy server on a vps. So now all my services are only accessible when my netbird vpn is active. I also spun up a pihole docker and added that to my netbird dns servers to try and get ad blocking on my mobile devices. So far so good.
I wonder however that while some webui’s like vaultwarden run with https, others like radarr dont. Is this a problem or does it not matter so much since i have the vpn running?
I dont really understand how I would go about making them https though. Im on unraid for my dockers and don’t see why some use https and others don’t.
Sorry if this is a convoluted post, I’m quite in over my head with all the networking and dns stuff and just hoping I’m not doing something stupid.
Thanks for your help!
HTTPS for everything means you have to buy into the cartel of “identity providers” that manage DNS and certificates, even if there are some mostly-good actors in there such as Let’s Encrypt, you still have the external dependency. As we have seen with cases such as Austistici, having that dependency can be a problem. It’s your call if it is in your case or not, but I wanted to raise this point because no one has pointed out that particular weakness vector so far in the thread.
In a very general sense, if your services are under a netbird or any sort of VPN where you control who gets account access or not, you “should not need” HTTPS. Might still be convenient to have.
Well you could technically also use self signed certificates. But it requires a bit more work as well as installing your own custom CA cert.
Back when I joined Lemmy (and before I understood what .ml was), I tried to contribute to the project. I suggested updating a link (possibly to docs) that was using an HTTP connection. The goal at the time was to make Lemmy approachable for normal users. As a user, I have non-secure sites blocked in my browser, so I have to manually proceed… and seeing that warning makes me not want to use a site. The devs told me that the link didn’t matter because the site was static. That was the end of my being willing to contribute, and my monetary support for the project ended as soon as I understood the dev’s beliefs and personalities.
For me, everything exposed to the internet is https (that is http + Apache reverse proxy using Let’s Encrypt), and everything that is not (and I access via my tailnet) is http.
short answer (and the safest one) is yes, use HTTPS always.
However, if and only if a service you are using is confined locally or via your privately hosted VPN (this just means not available over the public internet) you are probably OK without, unless there are other people on your local network who might be interested in snooping.
with your VPN (looks like netbird in this case) you should be OK, as the VPN handles encryption in the absense of HTTPS.
For more research checkout LetsEncrypt. its a super simple way to setup SSL (Which generally makes up the S part in HTTPS) and it’s free.
i think many of us started like you. you’ll get there, you’re just about to learn a lot of stuff before you do.
I just want to point out that it’s not just other people who might be interested in snooping. Compromised smart home equipment is a big potential vector of attack if services are unencrypted on your home network.
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1966/
If you’re not using https, then anyone who can see the traffic in your VPN can see everything you do.
Whether that’s a problem depends. In principle, as long as access to your VPN is restricted to people you trust, then http inside it is fine. In practice, if your security isn’t perfect, and someone gets access to your VPN, then https provides a meaningful second line of defense.
My recommendation would be to never use http for anything where a breach would be really painful. It’s good that vaultwarden is on https. Beyond that, https is absolutely the best practice, but if someone getting access to your service is only a mild inconvenience, then leaving it on http is fine as long as it’s only accessible inside your VPN - the risk is relatively low, and the consequences aren’t bad.
What about Tailscale, can they see http traffic over my Tailscale connection?
Tailscale is a sort of VPN. So, yeah, treat it the same.
I’m mostly responding to add a little context to the security concerns. Probably the biggest inside-the-VPN concern is that someone on your VPN gets some malware. So, if this is your family network, and say, your kid’s phone or laptop gets some malware, now any non-encrypted traffic is potentially compromised. Basically, the VPN is only as secure as the weakest link. That’s the thing you’re protecting against with https for individual services.
If I were hosting vaultwarden, and had my bank login in there, I absolutely wouldn’t consider a VPN + http sufficient protection. With LLMs, if we don’t have malware that knows how to hunt around for valuable credentials in the wild already, it’ll be here soon. I personally run my Jellyfin server over https because I’ve gone to the trouble to set up a good system to use letsencrypt with nginx as a proxy for any service. But I wouldn’t be too worried about running Jellyfin over http.
Tail scale should act as a mediator basically initializing the connection between two remote sessions. Then stepping away, letting go two remote sessions handle everything else. If every customer’s traffic had to go through them as a central server, it would be a central bottleneck and a massive operating cost for them. This is why free Vpns are never worth it. You are always the product on them, and they are always heavily mining your data.
I’m not sure that’s true to say it “steps away” because you can go to tailscale.com (on a machine that’s not connected to the tailnet) and log into the console and see all the machines and change their settings if you want, so clearly something is routing through their servers and actions taken on their servers are able to influence the machines.
I’m not an expert here clearly, just going on my own observations.
Its possible the client on your PC could be profiling your traffic and reporting back. That would likely end up badly for the parent company. But things like that aren’t unheard of and part of the reason I’m building my own router again. (See the ongoing GN LG coverage) Those sort of devices can spy on, and report back about other traffic on the network. If your smart devices are connected via Ethernet then they can likely see and read everything on your network that is unencrypted.
But a management console isn’t traffic snooping. Yes, you do have to trust the client to use it. They aren’t routing your traffic through them though. If they’re found to be spying it will be huge news turning them into a parriah in the IT and open source communities.
Thanks that makes sense
Is this a problem or does it not matter
It’s not a problem, but it does matter. With plain HTTP traffic everything you send and receive from a given site is unencrypted, so anyone in the chain delivering your package can read what you’re doing, collect your passwords and do all kinds of shenanigans. If it’s just your local network which is secured from the public internet then it’s pretty much just you who can intercept that traffic and it’s generally fine, as you already have all the passwords and such. And if you connect to the services via VPN that takes care of ‘secured from public interenet’ -part of the equation.
HTTPS is the same traffic, but encrypted with certificates. To achieve that you’ll need to have a server certificate and then browsers can use the public part of certificate to encrypt your traffic. With docker that’s commonly achieved either with docker-proxy or external proxy like nginx. Your computer already has a bunch of certificate authorities which it trusts and they are bundled in your operating system and/or browser. Without a trusted certificate your browser throws a warning about it, but if you proceed with ‘untrusted’ certificate the traffic will still be just as strongly encrypted as it would be with a ‘known’ certificate. The catch is that anyone can create their own certificates, so there’s no guarantee if the server actually is what it claims to be. For example I could sign my own certificate for gmail.com and offer that to users and steal their passwords. That would of course be trivial to figure out as the browser wouldn’t show the “good” lock symbol on address bar, but the certificate would be technically speaking a working certificate.
Now, to get a certificate for your own services you need to either build your own certificate authority and add that to trusted list of your devices or obtain a certificate from a already known authority like letsencrypt. With letsencrypt (and other similar services) you need to provide a proof that you own a domain which you’re obtaining the certificate for, so with those you can’t get a certificate for gmail.com or any other random domain name. Letsencrypt uses ‘certbot’ tool to validate certs, other services ask for spesific DNS entry or something else for proof that the domain is actually yours. But the main part is that all the ‘commonly known’ certificate authorities work only on publicly available services and domains (a bit simplified explanation, but that’s roughly it).
But once you have the certificate you’ll need to configure something on your network to use it. Actual best practice and configuration depends on the service you’re running. If your services run only on your local network and they are never allowed to public internet you’re likely fine to run everything without HTTPS encryption, but it’s still good to understand the differences and effects between unencrypted and encrypted traffic.
@inquanto Theoretically, when you are alone in your own network it can be ok, to go only with http. But login passwords over http are transferred without encryption.
The problem with https are valid certificates, so that clients can connect to your selfhosted services without issues.
For example, I was not able to connect with a KDE PIM program to a Nextcloud with a self signed certificate or with http only.With step-ca there can be a solution for this problem:
https://jan.wildeboer.net/2025/07/letsencrypt-homelab-stepca/If the access is only over VPN then http is fine, that’s how I access my arr setup. You can create certificates and manually upload them to radarr and other sites but it’s not necessary.
