I’m trying to better understand hosting a Lemmy Instance. Lurking discussions it seems like some people are hosting from the Cloud or VPS. My understanding is that it’s better to futureproof by running your own home server so that you have the data and the top most control of hardware, software etc. My understanding is that by hosting an instance via Cloud or VPS you are offloading the data / information to a 3rd party.
Are people actually running their own actual self-hosted servers from home? Do you have any recommended guides on running a Lemmy Instance?
They rely on hardware functionality in Epyc or Xeon CPUs for their stuff - I have the same hardware at home, and don’t use that functionality as it has massive problems. What I do have at home is smartcard based key storage for all my private keys - keys can’t be extracted from there, and the only outside copy is a passphrase encrypted based64 printout on paper in a sealed envelope in a safe place. Cloud operators will tell you they can also do the equivalent - but they’re lying about that.
And the homomorphic encryption thing they’re trying to sell is just stupid.
Assuming you put the same single application on bare metal the attack vectors are pretty much the same - but anybody sensible stopped doing that over a decade ago as hardware became just too powerful to justify that. So I assume nowadays anything hosted at home involves some form of container runtime or virtualization (or if not whoever is running it should reconsider their life choices).
Just like the container thing above, pretty much any deployment nowadays (even just simple low powered systems coming close to the old bare metal days) will contain at least some level of virtual networking. Traditionally we were binding everything to either localhost or world, and then going from there - but nowadays even for a simple setup it’s way more sensible to have only something like a nginx container with a public IP, and all services isolated in separate containers with various host only network bridges.
I like how you have a home smartcard. I can’t believe many do.
Why do you think cloud operators are lying?
Pretty much anyone should do. There’s no excuse to at least keep your personal PGP keys in some USB dongle. I personally wouldn’t recommend yubikey for various reasons, but there are a lot more options nowadays. Most of those vendors also now have HSM options which are reasonably priced and scale well enough for small hosting purposes.
I started a long time ago with empty smartcards and a custom card applet - back then it was quite complicated to find empty smartcards as a private customer. By now I’ve also switched to readily available modules.
One of the key concepts of the cloud is that your VMs are not tied to physical hardware. Which in turn means the key storage also isn’t - which means extraction of keys is possible. Now they’ll tell you some nonsense how they utilize cryptography to make it secure - but you can’t beat “key extraction is not possible at all”.
For the other bits I’ve mentioned a few times side channel attacks. Then there’s AMDs encrypted memory (SEV) claiming to fully isolate VMs from each other, with multiple published attacks. And we have AMDs PSP and intels ME, both with multiple published attacks. I think there also was a published attack against the key storage I described above, but I don’t remember the name.
I agree that our stuff is unlikely to be victim of an targeted attack in the cloud - but could be impacted by a targeted attack on something sharing bare metal with you. Or somebody just managed to perfect one of the currently possible attacks to run them larger scale for data collection - in all cases you’re unlikely to be properly informed about the data loss.