I have everything I host and expose behind authelia (which requires 2fa) as middleware or as the only login method with oicd, thus far it seems to work well, of course I get a bunch of malicious traffic and spam but this gets to authelia and stops there, I don’t even see multiple tried login tries ever so I felt pretty safe. However it does seem that everyone uses either fail2ban or crowdsec in addition so I have been wondering if it would really add any security in my setup or if I’m missing something. I’m sure it wouldn’t hurt but crowdsec always seemed a little too complex for me and I don’t want something I don’t fully understand in my security layer and I never saw a nice way to setup fail2ban so never bothered. Afaik there’s no webui or such things and you have to manually make working regex for everything. I’d like to know if I’m missing something or if anyone has tipps to give
You must log in or register to comment.
Fail2ban is just another tool in your toolbox. Defense in depth, as others mentioned.
Fail2ban is primarily a tool to prevent brute force attacks, especially useful for services that don’t do their own throttling. For example I usually put ssh in fail2ban, but if Authelia’s built-in protection is good enough, then use that.
Outside ssh, anything that could be used to brute force credentials should be in fail2ban if they’re exposed: web sites with simple auth, mail, etc.
Authelia should come with rate limiting to protect against brute-force attacks. That could be enough.
I’d generally advise to make sure such protection actually works. Like look up the limits and try to login with a wrong password 30 times… Especially if you added stuff on top (fail2ban, crowdsec…). Has happened to me I misconfigured stuff and it didn’t limit anything… Now I check to make sure for important bits like an authentication service.
Do make sure that you can eventually get back in after testing, though. Sure, it’s safer when even you can’t access it, but… :p
Please don’t expose your services to the internet directly. Use something like Tailscale/Headscale/whatever mesh VPN is relevant now. It’ll always be 100 times better than this and you wouldn’t worry about Authelia, f2b and CrowdSec (though updating your services and server(s) is always worth it).
It will not be a 100 times better than this, you’d need the vpn setup already on every client, how could others ever connect to it? Its also just cool to have a domain and expose it properly, I already use a vpn for admin only things
“Okay mom, you need to install this VPN, log in, and make sure it’s on whenever you’re using Immich. Can you install it for Dad too? Now I’m going to call grandma back and explain that it isn’t a Deen Peen Em and she’s never going to find that.”
There are times and places. The moment you want the non tech side of the family involved, a proper with server over the open internet is usually the better option.
