This is one of the core things I've been working towards with DNTLS [1]. I love the idea of tunnels, especially for sharing between private parties. The SaaS providers (Tailscale, Cloudflare, etc.) have done a good job making it really easy on their infra, but it really blurs the line of "self-hosted" to me. Ideally we end up with solutions like this that can be run entirely without an intermediary.
If that's all that was necessary then I feel like a lot of these SaaS tools wouldn't be as popular. I suspect a lot of Tailscale's success is because wireguard is not easy nor does it solve the full problem space (i.e. discovery). With `tailscale serve` I can get a private HTTPS endpoint to my local machine in almost no time.
No port forwarding. No public IP required. No special proxy to set up.
Iroh already runs public relays. Your two computers will signal through those, and then port-knock and form a direct connection to each other, perfectly encrypted.
We just need to define a new https:// url, like ... let's call it "irohttps://" maybe, so then you could contact my laptop with "irohttps://<hash>/path?query".
I don't have the code at hand, but I think it's better to just have a nginx server that only serves content if the browser has a specific certificate installed.
That way you generate a key pair, share the public key with anyone that you want to share the content with and that's it.
Downside is that some browsers don't handle the certificates properly (especially on phones)
While I do appreciate very much the "we already have the technology, let's just use it!" approach + the self hosting aspect, one of the downsides of self hosting without a proxy is having to expose your endpoint and likely having minimal defensive tools.
It seems like every day there's some new "expose your laptop to the internet!!!111" service (or protocol or methodology) that I have to block or otherwise disable at work.
Users and their agents are constantly trying to make all sorts of horrible things forward-facing, and what sucks is that there's not a comprehensive way to block this stuff categorically without severely impacting a ton of legitimate usage.
(And yes, we have _very_ easy sanctioned ways for users to deploy things onto actual managed hosts and make them forward-facing)
I forward port 80/443 on my router to port 80/443 on my home LAN nginx webserver and point my domain name to my home IPv4. Then I put files in directories. It works great and has worked great for a couple decades. While the number of static nginx vulnerabilities that have come out since AI became good at coding has increased I still haven't run into one that applies to my simple static nginx setup. All this tunneling and secrecy and credentials is... well, it applies to some cases and I don't want to dismiss those. But it really doesn't apply to most human person's use cases. Just host a normal server on your home IPv4. There's nothing to break.
> Just host a normal server on your home IPv4. There's nothing to break.
There is a privacy aspect. For example you seem to have watched Meet Joe Black and Six Days Seven Nights recently. Do you care that we know that? Maybe not, but I can also see the porn you enjoyed.
I don't understand how you would know that. If you mean those sites where you put in an ip address and get a list of torrents that IPv4 has been associated with then I guess you aren't aware that those things are wildly inaccurate in the false positive sense. Because of this I am not sure if you were just giving a made up example of information you might find on those sites, or if you actually checked my profile and pinged superkuh.com to get my ipv4 and ran it and got fake results. An IP address is not private info. It's how we participate with each other on the internet. In either case I'm not worried because I know those site's purported results don't mean anything. If you mean nation state level actors or the like, well, yeah. That threat model is a bit beyond this.
It is much more private to host on your static webserver and link your friend to http(s)://my.ip.goes.here/orwhatever.jpg than it is to use a third party corporate services that both establish third party doctorine of no assumption of privacy and who have a profit-motive to sell your info. Do it yourself and you have a legal assumption of privacy and no one's continued existence is dependent upon selling information about you.
This is wildly over-complicated and also has a bunch of footguns and security risks.
For example, that very first NGINX section allows an attacker to direct their incoming traffic to any arbitrary listening port on localhost. They can even write a simple for loop in bash that would use curl to test all of the different ports. This also bypasses any firewall rules that you might have blocking traffic from the outside world.
be very careful following the instructions in this article.
It's already using a high port. Forwarding a high port directly with SSH prevent exposing the service through a virtual host and provide HTTPS (but I didn't think of it until your mentioned it). And it would open the service to be discovered by enumerating all possible ports, like you mentioned in your first comment.
sish and ngrok are mentioned in the intro along with the reasons I didn't go this way (specific SSH server to run for the first and not self-hosted for the later).
This domain is crowded with solutions. I only explored that myself because the "free" solutions only requiring an SSH client were unreliable, including the free tier of ngrok (broken SSH tunnel).
A number of years ago, I created a fully open source (MIT) project called sish [0] that does just this.
sish is a SSH server written specifically for tunneling. You get all of the benefits of SSH, but also automatic TLS, a web console of requests a tunnel has received, and various other features. You can also tunnel more than just HTTP(S). You can tunnel websockets, TCP connections, and even have internal alias connections for using ProxyJump within the tunnel. All stateless and all protected with SSH auth.
If you’re not interested in self hosting, there’s a hosted version at tuns.sh [1] that has multi region support and a few other cool features (including UDP tunneling) as part of the pico.sh [2] membership ($2/mo). Happy to answer any questions in this space!
Thank you, I’ve been using sish for the past month or so to expose my dev severs over the network when it time to review changes. It means I can review from my second laptop or my phone as if I were sitting at the computer running the dev server.
I like that the design composes existing tools instead of creating a new daemon, but what threat model covers leaked URLs, tunnel enumeration, forwarded credentials, and abandoned sessions?
aliasxneo | 22 hours ago
[1]: https://dntls.substack.com/p/the-new-internet
gonzalohm | 21 hours ago
aliasxneo | 21 hours ago
subscribed | 20 hours ago
1vuio0pswjnm7 | 6 hours ago
subscribed | an hour ago
Re Dropbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
nagaiaida | 4 hours ago
guessmyname | 22 hours ago
benatkin | 22 hours ago
toomim | 22 hours ago
- https://github.com/aflin/iroh-webproxy
- https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-proxy-utils
No port forwarding. No public IP required. No special proxy to set up.
Iroh already runs public relays. Your two computers will signal through those, and then port-knock and form a direct connection to each other, perfectly encrypted.
We just need to define a new https:// url, like ... let's call it "irohttps://" maybe, so then you could contact my laptop with "irohttps://<hash>/path?query".
Muromec | 21 hours ago
so... ICE/TURN/STUN ? Sorry I forgot which one of them actually works, but they do work
flippingheck | 18 hours ago
What toomim is excited about is this combination of technologies, and that's more than just NAT punching or encryption.
_def | 19 hours ago
Not perfectly, but good enough for port forwarding web interfaces through cgnat
flippingheck | 18 hours ago
1vuio0pswjnm7 | 5 hours ago
That's not "self-hosting"
Last I checked this project also automatically forwards traffic through their servers when direct connections fail
It's not even peer-to-peer
bigbadfeline | 3 hours ago
https://github.com/rustonbsd/iroh-ssh/blob/main/CUSTOM_RELAY...
snehesht | 22 hours ago
gonzalohm | 21 hours ago
Downside is that some browsers don't handle the certificates properly (especially on phones)
jagged-chisel | 20 hours ago
nvme0n1p1 | 19 hours ago
Transformanshen | 21 hours ago
esseph | 21 hours ago
DominoTree | 18 hours ago
Users and their agents are constantly trying to make all sorts of horrible things forward-facing, and what sucks is that there's not a comprehensive way to block this stuff categorically without severely impacting a ton of legitimate usage.
(And yes, we have _very_ easy sanctioned ways for users to deploy things onto actual managed hosts and make them forward-facing)
superkuh | 20 hours ago
jagged-chisel | 20 hours ago
tredre3 | 19 hours ago
There is a privacy aspect. For example you seem to have watched Meet Joe Black and Six Days Seven Nights recently. Do you care that we know that? Maybe not, but I can also see the porn you enjoyed.
superkuh | 19 hours ago
It is much more private to host on your static webserver and link your friend to http(s)://my.ip.goes.here/orwhatever.jpg than it is to use a third party corporate services that both establish third party doctorine of no assumption of privacy and who have a profit-motive to sell your info. Do it yourself and you have a legal assumption of privacy and no one's continued existence is dependent upon selling information about you.
1vuio0pswjnm7 | 5 hours ago
But the OP made no mention of "privacy"
It refers to "self-hosted"
jamiesonbecker | 18 hours ago
For example, that very first NGINX section allows an attacker to direct their incoming traffic to any arbitrary listening port on localhost. They can even write a simple for loop in bash that would use curl to test all of the different ports. This also bypasses any firewall rules that you might have blocking traffic from the outside world.
be very careful following the instructions in this article.
Read the man page for SSH, and especially the remote forward section. https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/ssh.1.html
vbernat | 17 hours ago
jamiesonbecker | 17 hours ago
Your scheme is smart and creative but unnecessarily risky.
SSH can do remote listens to the world by itself, no second nginx needed, but sish or ngrok might be a better solution for the general case.
Anytime you punch holes, you're taking a risk, so make it as narrow as you can.
vbernat | 16 hours ago
sish and ngrok are mentioned in the intro along with the reasons I didn't go this way (specific SSH server to run for the first and not self-hosted for the later).
This domain is crowded with solutions. I only explored that myself because the "free" solutions only requiring an SSH client were unreliable, including the free tier of ngrok (broken SSH tunnel).
antoniomika | 17 hours ago
sish is a SSH server written specifically for tunneling. You get all of the benefits of SSH, but also automatic TLS, a web console of requests a tunnel has received, and various other features. You can also tunnel more than just HTTP(S). You can tunnel websockets, TCP connections, and even have internal alias connections for using ProxyJump within the tunnel. All stateless and all protected with SSH auth.
If you’re not interested in self hosting, there’s a hosted version at tuns.sh [1] that has multi region support and a few other cool features (including UDP tunneling) as part of the pico.sh [2] membership ($2/mo). Happy to answer any questions in this space!
[0] https://github.com/antoniomika/sish
[1] https://tuns.sh
[2] https://pico.sh
pbreit | 17 hours ago
duc_minh | 14 hours ago
joshstrange | 9 hours ago
pbreit | 17 hours ago
soltanov | 17 hours ago
k7peak | 12 hours ago
Tepix | 10 hours ago
vdqtp3 | 8 hours ago
v3ss0n | 7 hours ago