I run a self-hosted server at home on which I have run a bunch of personal stuff (like nextcloud etc.). To prevent pointing DNS servers at my home router, I run a reverse proxy on a VPS that I rent (from Scaleway FWIW).
Today I was trying to figure to what extent that exposes my data to my VPS provider and whether I can do something about it. Disclaimer: this is just a hobby exercise. I’m not paranoid, I just want to learn for my own self how to improve security of my setup.
My reverse proxy terminates the SSL connection and then proxies the connection over a wireguard connection to my home server. This means that (a) data is decrypted in the RAM of the VPS and (b) the certificates live unencrypted in the storage of the VPS. This means that the VPS provider, if they want to, can read all the traffic unencrypted to and from my home server.
I was thinking that I can solve both problems by using Nginx’s SSL pass-through feature. This would allow me to not terminate SSL on the VPS solving (a) and to move the certificates to my home server solving (b).
But just as I was playing around with it, I realised that SSL pass-through would not solve the problem of trying to protect my data from the VPS provider. As long as my DNS records point at the VPS provider’s servers, the VPS provider can always get their own certificates for my domains and do a MitM attack. Therefore, I might as well keep the certificates on the VPS since I still have to trust them not to make their own behind my back.
In the end I concluded that as long as I use a VPS provider to route my traffic to my home server, there is no fool-proof way to secure my data from them. Intuitively it makes sense, the data crosses their hardware physically and thus they will have access to it. The only way to stop it would be to update the DNS records to point directly at my home server which I don’t want to do.
Is this correct thinking or is there some way to prevent the VPS provider from seeing my data?
Again, I’m trying to solve this problem as a hobby exercise. The most sensitive data that I have is stored encrypted at the filesystem level and I only decrypt it locally on my own machine to work on it. Therefore, the actually sensitive data that would be cost me a lot if compromised is never available unencrypted on the VPS. Due to the overhead of this encryption and other complications, I don’t do this for all my files.
It sounds like you’re doing something very similar to me. I run my Lemmy and Mastodon server out of my home. I have a wireguard tunnel between that server and my cloud VPS. The cloud VPS handles reverse proxying. The information that I am most likely leaking is metadata. Metadata is surprisingly useful. In an ideal world we could secure and obfuscate everything. For the most part though, your traffic is secure and your cloud provider won’t be able to really get more than your metadata.
I don’t think it’s just metadata that’s leaking though. I would say it’s the entire content of the connection. If the reverse proxy terminates the secure connection it will decrypt the data which will be available unencrypted in the VPS. Outside of the VPS instance the traffic remains entirely encrypted.
Admittedly this decrypted data is not easy to access - you would need to have root access and be able to capture the traffic from within the VPS. But a VPS provider has this kind of access - as they run the hypervisor, they have direct access to the RAM (and possibly even a much easier way to just log in as root into the VPS itself). I think you do have to trust the VPS provider not to peek into the VPS itself. As long as you’re paying for the service, that’s probably a safe assumption.