Hello friends, I am considering self hosting on my desktop computer, which already has gentoo Linux installed. But my concern is that my regular desktop use could compromise the security of self hosted applications, which tend to handle private user data.
What can I do to secure myself against this threat?
For example, browsers on their own are a security nightmare. You are running arbitrary remote scripts, and there’s no telling the extent of damage they do (most websites out there doing extensive tracking).
What can I do to secure my self hosted applications while running them on the same machine? Is there something I can do to somehow isolate browsers and other sketchy applications from the damage they could possibly do?
Maybe just don’t run your services under your regular user account?
Create one or more new user accounts and run them that way. Make sure not to give your regular user account any access to the data in the new accounts.
That doesn’t stop all attacks: side-channel attacks (Spectre?) can still happen, and your machine can for example still run out of memory and break your services that way, but it’s a solid start.
Flatpak and Docker. Containerize your applications and ensure they have the least amount of permissions. Flatpak will let you control what files an app can access with the Flatseal app, and Docker will keep your self-hosted apps isolated. Or even better: use rootless podman containers.
You could run your self hosted services in a VM. The rest of your system can’t access that so it’s about as secure as it gets. That’s kind of what VMs are really good at. The downside is that are pretty much running another operating system inside your operating system so you need the RAM and CPU to support it. If you are running Gnome on that Gentoo box then look at Gnome Boxes.
Setup multiple Virtual Machines on your desktop. Have a VM for web browsing and a VM for hosting your services. If either get compromised it would be much harder to jump into the other VM or access the host machine.
One option could be running your browsers and stuff with Flatpak, then you can isolate them much more easily to only have access to specific parts of the filesystem.
Otherwise you could run all the self hosted apps inside a VM, that would heavily limit what the host apps could access.
