Post by @werebearstare@lemmy.ca

2026-10-16 22:44 UTC

Security architect at a large enterprise here, so grain of salt with what I say as it may be overkill for your use case. First question you have to ask yourself is so what? If they completely compromise your devices, what impact will that have? Establish what your hard and soft limits are. Are you ok with your device becoming a crypto miner? If not, what controls can you put in place? e.g. CPU/GPU monitoring and alerting. Are you worried about threat actors stealing your personal data? Consider encrypting your drives and applying least privilege (don’t have a single user account). Worried they will do the favour of encrypting your drives for you? Look into off site storage. If you are only using docker, the switch to Proxmox may give you trouble as docker isn’t supported. That said, I run Proxmox and have everything as an LXC and I think it is an excellent technology. If you stay on Docker, look up the OWASP Docker cheat sheet. It will help you to lock everything down tightly. You could also migrate to podman. Still not comfortable with the risks and controls at that point? Look at creating docker networks or a SDN. Also, log into your router. You may find that you can create a DMZ to limit an adversaries ability to pivot. Feel free to reach out and ask more.

Replies (2)

@non_burglar@lemmy.world 2026-10-17 03:37

+1 for owasp resources.

Open ##5223061
@LewdLemon@sh.itjust.works 2026-10-17 08:52

Thanks for your detailed reply and expertise! I really appreciate it! First question you have to ask yourself is so what? You’re right to call out my lack of threat modeling. I am aware that the “cost” of what I’m planning here likely outweighs the actual risks. That’s a deliberate choice though: one of my objectives in homelabbing is to “learn how the big guys do it”, i.e. learning and implementing, bit by bit, networking and security best practices. That said, all of my drives are (LUKS) encrypted (although this will only help against evil maid attacks physically stealing my disks, since data is only encrypted at rest, not while the server is in operation) I do have some CPU monitoring in place I have applied the principle of least privilege (as far as I can see at least) I have set up an off-site backup server running (although I need to improve automation and deduplication; I’ll probably go with Borg here) Thank you also for pointing me towards OWASP Docker cheat sheet! I didn’t know this resource yet, although I seem to have found others that said the same thing. I already have in place: no docker socket exposed to services user set for every service that didn’t give me a headache doing that (some assume root and won’t accept setting a user) username remapping is active all containers have their caps dropped and selectively only put those back in which they need I expose almost no container ports, and only those necessary; instead, communication with the containers is handled on my reverse proxy’s network (i.e. via the internal docker network) privilege escalation is disabled I have played around with rootless docker (again, stubborn containers assuming root prevented me from going all-in) and considered Podman, although just putting containers in a VM looks like a more frictionless route to me. All things considered, your advice seems to be: to first consider whether I actually need all this security. I really don’t, yet I want to learn how to set it up anyway. to first explore and all other hardening avenues. I have, to a certain degree, and beyond that run into brick walls. If I might exhaust a little more of your time, I’d be curious how you judge the next step I’ve suggested: splitting duties between separate servers, thus segmenting public from private physically, or going the virtual route (again, by splitting into a public and a private VM and separate them through strict software firewalling).

Open ##5233399