do you know for sure that nothing is listening on it? Do you scan every device you connect to your network?
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Opening a port on consumer routers does not mean that all devices are open. Normally you forward a port to a host+port in the local network. In most cases some server which you control. All other devices are not affected by opening a port.
This doesn’t really apply if you’re port forwarding to a specific device. In that case you know that you have told your firewall to forward port 80 & 443 (for example) to your web server and you know what ports that has open. I would not be using UPNP on the other hand as that seems dangerous especially in the IOT era.
and, even if you scan them, how do you know that a port knocker isn't there waiting to the secret knock?
It's typically against the terms of service to open ports less than 1024 (well known ports) of most ISP's for personal internet. That, and there are bots that probe for insecure and misconfigured stuff constantly. Spin up a VPS and take a look at the SSH logs. What if a zero day vulnerability occurs? Are you going to be able to react quick enough to prevent someone from doing damage?
Cloudflare is nice because you no longer need to update your DNS A records, plus it caches data, automatically enables SSL, and absorbs bot traffic for you. Have also tried the Wireguard + VPS route, but that gets expensive because most charge ingress and egress.
It's typically against the terms of service to run any server.
I think Cloudflare Tunnel is awesome for situations where you want to deploy one or two applications without getting a full reverse proxy like Traefik or Nginx handling everything especially if you’re dealing with CGNAT. Also, if you don’t want to manage your own authentication solution for locking down apps, Cloudflare makes these easy to apply to your applications.
So for users who once would have (and still do) open ports directly to each individual application with little to no authentication in between, these solutions offer a turnkey option to fix a lot of things that would otherwise have been out of reach.
OK, i did not think about people opening a port for every application - this would be stupid
Especially when people get into things like Sonarr and Radarr as their first foray into self hosting it’s not hard to see why they might assume that there is security in obscurity and think that there is no risk to opening up those applications directly to the world!