https://cameroncros.github.io/wifi-condom.html
This is my travel router setup, might be useful for you to start from.
I would encourage you to setup wireguard or tailscale, so that you dont have to expose SSH at all, but SSH hardening is definitely a good start.
Worth monitoring your SSH logs as well, that’ll give you an idea of how constant the automated attacks can be. Even when I was using a non-standard port, I was getting heaps of attacks.
I dont know. I’m in an adjacent industry, and even amongst some of my colleagues who do have degrees, there are some significant knowledge gaps. Companies often have entire teams dedicated to cyber security, and still get this wrong.
There are just so many subtleties that need to be done right. I’m pretty certain that even my setup isnt properly secure, and the only reason things haven’t crashed down is pure luck.
The appliance model is probably the best way to enforce security practices for regular users, but that pushes significant control/responsibility back to the supplier (they must stay up to date with patches, force push out updates so no one is left behind, limit flexibility so everyones setup is relatively homogeneous). Done right (for security), that costs a lot of money, so likely a subscription model. And it rapidly becomes a “cloud” service that runs off your own electricity, which loses all the self hosting benefits.
Sometimes it feels like a portion of the community views complexity as a badge of honour.
Its not this, it’s that there are very serious risks to self hosting (dataloss, hacks etc), and if they aren’t prepared for them, itll be catastrophic.
The gatekeeping isnt just for fun, there are actual risks and downsides.
As for prepackaging an appliance, we already have a model for how that plays out. There are millions of ISP provided routers and IoT things, and every other day there is a new breach involving them.
EMF paint definitely exists, its been used on military planes for decades now. But the emf paint from Aliexpress? Definitely sus.
EMF observation may be technically capable of all of those things, but realistically, anyone who would go to that extreme (of targetting a single households occupants) is equally capable/likely to just barge in, arrest you and slap an ankle monitor and security cameras in your house. So its kinda pointless to worry about it.
This is well into literal tin foil hattery, but:
You’d have to check what kind of frequency range it actually protects against, and you’d need a way to test it (no doubt there is some fake emf paint around as well).
You could also wrap your walls in chicken wire and get a pretty decent Faraday cage effect for cheapish.
It’ll also break your wifi and phone (if it works).
Unless you are running a spy agency, this is just a waste of effort IMO.
None that im aware of. There are webscrapers, and I guess you could just webscrape and dump the results into a postgres db and use it to index. But I’m guessing you’ll eventually want something more tuned/custom? But even if it existed, there is the discovery problem. How do you find the sites to scrape? Bing and google both let site operators submit urls, but that isn’t gonna scale to self-hosting.
Yes, some people absolutely take things way too far, and often unproductively.
Like the person who was trying to disable websockets. Or the people who will shun signal, but jump directly on the flavour of the month signal clone, which might be completely backdoored.
If you dont know what you are doing, randomly turning things on and off at best does nothing, at worst makes you even more signaturable/trackable.
Its good to educate yourself on various protections, but unfortunately, it requires a lot of careful research and understanding.
One way or another, the server that hosts a resource can track who is requesting what. You as the server owner can just as easily track who is accessing what, but if you avoid using a CDN, then it limits the tracker to just yourself. The cost is that you’ll have increased traffic, and there is always the suspicion that you may have tampered with the lightbox.js file to do something malicious.
On the self include side, the instructions you linked seem pretty straightforward, so it should be possible to use it that way. What is issue your facing?
Not all android TVs are bad, but I think a lot of the cheap ones are pretty bad. Mine is horribly laggy, and will occasionally refuse to turn on unless I powercycle it.
Which Chromecast do your parents have? The ones pre-Google TV are pretty brainless to use, but I hate the new google TV ones as well.
That really doesn’t sound that easy…
Pihole has its issues, ~~but at least you dont need to setup each and every device individually. ~~ edit: I have been informed that this is not the only way.
For balance, the main issue I have with pihole is that family members can’t easily bypass it when they need to, which is inconvenient.
The major one that concerns me is who is behind them. Even if we trust that their encryption is not backdoored, there is a lot of information that can be gathered just from the frequency of messages and who they are between.
If it came out that a three letter agency was running one of these networks, it would not suprise me at all.
Essentially, yeah? Unless you calculate the OTPs by pen and paper, you have to use some kind of software, and therefore you have to trust that it is safe. Writing your own like OP is actually a very safe option, because you can trust yourself, but everyone else needs to trust OP.
Attack vectors apply to the add-on itself, it is (potentially) the shady site. OP has the potential to update the add-on later with its own malicious code. This is true of all addons, hence the trust issue.
I dont have any problem with OP advertising their addon, but potential users should be aware of the risks.
I appreciate you have put effort into this, and you have gone out of your way to make it safer, but if the extension were to become malicious at a later date, expanding permissions (and relying on users brainlessly-clicking accept) or using an exploit or sidechannel would undo any of that.
The downside of browser extensions is that they are operating within a massive codebase, and thus have a huge attack surface if they decide to become malicious.
For what its worth, I commend your efforts here, its just near impossible to trust any peice of software not backed by the reputation of an established company/developer.
I hear you, I host lots of stuff. But none I can think of would be RCE vulnerable directly from a CPU vulnerability. You could use a CPU vulnerability to privesc later, but once someone has RCE, your already pwn’d, and privesc is mostly a given anyway either way. So CPU vulnerabilities falls way down the list of things to worry about.
As long as you keep your router OS patched and up to date, CPU vulns really arent a concern.