Specifically from the standpoint of protecting against common and not-so-common exploits.

I understand the concept of a reverse proxy and how works on the surface level, but do any of the common recommendations (npm, caddy, traefik) actually do anything worthwhile to protect against exploit probes and/or active attacks?

Npm has a “block common exploits” option but I can’t find anything about what that actually does, caddy has a module to add crowdsec support which looks like it could be promising but I haven’t wrapped my head around it yet, and traefik looks like a massive pain to get going in the first place!

Meanwhile Bunkerweb actually looks like it’s been built with robust protections out of the box, but seems like it’s just as complicated as traefik to setup, and DNS based Let’s Encrypt requires a pro subscription so that’s a no-go for me anyway.

Would love to hear people’s thoughts on the matter and what you’re doing to adequately secure your setup.

Edit: Thanks for all of your informative replies, everyone. I read them all and replied to as many as I could! In the end I’ve managed to get npm working with crowdsec, and once I get cloudflare to include the source IP with the requests I think I’ll be happy enough with that solution.

  • PerhyteEnglish
    2•7 months ago

    If there happens to be some mental TLS handshake RCE that comes up, chances are they are all using the same underlying TLS library so all will be susceptible…

    Among common reverse proxies, I know of at least two underlying TLS stacks being used:

    • Nginx uses OpenSSL.
      • This is probably the one you thought everyone was using, as it’s essentially considered to be the “default” TLS stack.
    • Caddy uses crypto/tls from the Go standard library (which has its own implementation, it’s not just a wrapper around OpenSSL).
      • This is in all likelihood also the case for Traefik (and any other Go-based reverse proxies), though I did not check.