Hey all!

I’m fairly new to Home Assistant and have just created a few dashboards to be able to view my router statistics and be able to restart them via REST if need be. Love being able to do this seamlessly from one place.

It got me thinking however, that I can only really access the dashboard when I’m on my internal network. I know that there is a paid Home Assistant cloud that would enable me to view my dashboards and such publicly and securely, but I was wondering if this community has set it up themselves for free and securely.

Would anyone be able to guide me in the right direction?

    • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I’m thinking to expose HA via a cloudflare tunnel; but I’m concerned as to what security implications this may have. I’m not sure what, if any, security issues the HA login page may have. I can easily put everything through a reverse proxy, which I already have set up for other reasons. I may migrate all my externally exposed webpages via cloudflare.

      Have any lemmings used cloudflare for this? what is your experience with it?

      • redcalcium@c.calciumlabs.comEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        Security is a rabbit hole and you can go very deep depending on your risk model (an ordinary middle class people has different cybersecurity risk than, say, a CEO of a major bank). Let’s say you are an ordinary lemming that don’t have to be worry about being specifically targeted by a hacker group or a nation state, you just don’t want some botnets get into your network and take over your IoT stuff, I think the following is reasonable enough:

        • by deploying your HA instance using docker or VM, if it somehow got compromized by an automated botnets / malware, the infection will be contained and you can easily wipe it off and start again. Real hackers might be able to escape the sandbox but run of the mills botnets that always scan the internet for exploits usually don’t.
        • setup OTP: https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/authentication/multi-factor-auth/
        • you can max out security level of HA login page (or the entire HA) using cloudflare’s firewall rule: https://developers.cloudflare.com/firewall/cf-dashboard/create-edit-delete-rules/ . This should stop most bots from trying to bruteforce your login page.
        • assuming you’re using cloudflare tunnel, you aren’t actually exposing your entire machine to the internet, but just the homeassistant port. That being said, it’ll be nice if you take some precaution and disable root ssh login and perhaps disallow password login too, just for peace of mind.
    • sikhness@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Would using Tailscale be similar to a VPN where I’d have to establish a VPN connection and have all my traffic directed to Tailscale?

      • redcalcium@c.calciumlabs.comEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Tailscale is a virtual lan network. When you enable tailscale, you’ll have an additional network and ip address in your connected devices. It’s not actually redirecting all your traffics there, unless you specifically configure it to do so (if you do so, you can designated a device as an “exit node” for your outbound traffic).