I’m running my own HA locally, in my house, but I would like to be able to access it also when I’m not home. So I’ve put it on my Zerotier One VPN, which works fine. Except for two things:
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HA no longer knows when I’m home - it thinks I’m always home;
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Other people in my household would also like to have remote access, but it’s unrealistic to have them install and use the VPN.
So - can I just open it up, and rely on long, complex passeords? Or is that a complete no-go?
I’ll add pangolin to the list of things to think about trying. It was relatively easy to set up and it can run locally or on a vps. If it’s on a vps you dont need a constant IP or ddns because your hone server will connect to pangolin on the vps and the vps will serve the apps. youll point the dns records to your vps.
It’s what i use for my extended family to reach my immich instance. No complaints yet whatsoever. It’s traefik+crowdsec+wireguard under the hood but all abstracted into a maintained, easy to use GUI. Youll have granular control over which users can use which services/subdomains and geoblocking etc is effortless.
I put a centralised authentication layer (pocket id) on top of it for easier enrollment across various apps im running but for homeassistant only the built in 2FA should be enough.
It’s generally fine to open it up, if your somewhat know what you’re doing. I wouldn’t do it without some protection measures like fail2ban and making sure HA is always up to date.
Nabu Casa, the manufacturer of HA, has a paid option where they take care of publicly accessing your local HA instance. I think that’s a good solution as well. It includes backups on their servers.
Nabu Casa is the way. Built by Home Assistant for Home Assistant, and utterly seamless and reliable (in my experience).
Most importantly it supports the developers who have created this amazing piece if software! Do it! 👍🏼🙏🏼
Absolutely, cost-wise is almost the same as any other alternative, plus you support the devs. No brainier choice. I’m 100% in.
not cheaper than free, tailscale is free
@ropatrick
Plus offsite encrypted backup included.
If you have to open it up, then you can at least allow-list IP addresses through your firewall so it’s not everyone who gets full access.
How’s that supposed to work if the other people want to access it “from the Internet”, most likely meaning their mobile phones when not at home? Find out all IP subnets for the carrier?
I have done something similar on mine but reversed. Instead of a whitelist I put together a rule to geo block all countries except the one I am in at the firewall. Before doing this I absolutely saw unknown traffic hit me constantly. With this in place it has been quiet ever since. You could probably narrow it down some more if you really feel like it’s necessary. I know this is also hardee for some people to do since before I had this firewall I did not have an easy option to just block traffic like this.
I have mine available as a tor hidden service.
What I personally do is have it accessible over WireGuard. Open TCP ports to the Internet is a bad idea. This does mean you have to launch WireGuard every time, but it’s way more secure
Wireguard runs in a different subnet at home, so the ping sensor for my phone fails on the regular WLAN address and this my ha always knows when home and when not.
If I understood correctly, you may find https://wgtunnel.com/ useful. No need to launch wireguard manually anymore.
Wish they had it for iOS
Mine is on the internet. The real risk is a zero day auth bypass, password cracking won’t really work when the HA interface sends notifications on authentication failures.
Mine is open to the internet, via a nginx reverse proxy. I made it ban people who try to brute-force my password. It’s been fine like that for years now:
http: trusted_proxies: - w.x.y.z use_x_forwarded_for: true ip_ban_enabled: true login_attempts_threshold: 10Thanks, TIL about the built in ip ban
I work in IT at a major university, and watch the logs. My Home Assistant instance is open to the Internet behind an nginx reverse proxy with SSL. (The official add-on makes it easy.) Brute-forcing passwords on HTTPS is not really a thing anymore. I get a connection attempt or two per month at home. At work, they go for known vulnerabilities in web apps; WordPress, mostly.
Brute-forcing passwords on HTTPS is not really a thing anymore.
Why is that?
I would expect that the cost-benefit calculation doesn’t work out. If you have a password hash in local memory, then the computer can try each possibility in nanoseconds, and it can still take several minutes to crack trivial passwords.
To brute-force a password over HTTPS, each attempt is on the order of microseconds, about 1/1000th the speed, or slower. Plus, all the overhead of SSL, which imposes a compute burden on the attacking machine.
And that’s just trivial passwords, plus assuming that the target host doesn’t have connection rate-limiting, or even a sysadmin who’d notice the logs getting flooded with bad requests continuously for a couple of days.
Tailscale is possibly a solution for you.
I just use a Cloudflare tunnel using the Cloudflared plugin and a custom domain name. So no need to open ports. I use long passwords for the users. Not sure how unsafe it is but in HA you get a notification when a failed login happened.
Mine is on the internet behind nginx. I block connections not originating in countries that are reasonable for my family. I don’t like geoip blocking but it straight up eliminated almost all the IDS alerts. I needed to migrate to DNS based validation for certbot.
If I or my family leave the geo region, I’m “away” anyways until I return to the area and my device gets a new IP. Or I can allow the country temporarily.
With the price of oil and therefore plane tickets what it is, I won’t be leaving my geo region.
So - can I just open it up, and rely on long, complex passeords? Or is that a complete no-go?
Install Fail2Ban on a free cloud VM and watch it for a couple of days. Seeing the never-ending intrusion attempts from around the world was a real eye-opener. There is no way I’d expose HA (or anything else except Wireguard) to the Internet. (Open WG ports appear closed unless they receive the correct key.)
In your situation I’d just pay for Home Assistant Cloud. It’s not expensive and will do exactly what you want to do.
For a zero cost solution I use Tasker to automatically enable a Wireguard tunnel whenever we’re not on home wifi. It allows direct access to everything on our local lan, and as a bonus prevents our wireless carrier from monitoring our Internet activities. A combination of the OpenWRT Ubus integration and a BLE integration (using inexpensive Shelly switch modules) detect when we’re home with 100% accuracy.
I solved Problem 1 by adding ICMP to HA. It’s constantly checking if my phone is present on the WiFi*.
I’m using Tailscale instead of ZeroTier, but that should not matter.
*I could also use my routers integrstion, but this logic worked with my shitty old router that had no integration
I’m using cloudflared to give it a bit more protection over a plain reverse proxy
Why not a presence sensor of and kind? Check your router’s WiFi client list for your phone MAC or something
