4 ms·

Why not run it from your home network? You're likely already paying for home Internet, and since most of the access will be local, it'll be neither slow nor wil

Why not run it from your home network? You're likely already paying for home Internet, and since most of the access will be local, it'll be neither slow nor will it cost anything. Don't forget that running your stuff and putting your data onto servers belonging to big corporations means that even if they're not scanning everything the way Google scans your email, they can still access it, so it's better, but not worry free.

sneak 4y ago
This is against the ToS for most residential internet providers and can subject you to disconnection/ban from one of the few/only carriers available in your city.
- generalizations 4y ago
  I imagine that funneling it through an encrypted VPN would make it impossible to detect.
  - sneak 4y ago
    My ISP accused me of running servers (I don't) simply because I used too much traffic. I send 100% of my traffic VPN encrypted and I pay an extra $50 or $70 monthly for "unlimited" data transfer.
  - danuker 4y ago
    But then, it's not open to public access, just to you or whoever you trust with your VPN credentials.
- danuker 4y ago
  How tyrannical. In Romania, my ISP Digi gives me a free domain name.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    Due to old infrastructure (early adopter problem) and generally having more people with internet connected devices, ISPs differentiate between residential and business internet plans. Business plans typically provide either an SLA or at least less likely to employ traffic shaping. Residential plans tend to thus prohibit running a public facing server for commercial purposes, since they're over-provisioned on the assumption that residences don't always fully utilize their capacity. This is becoming less of an issue with fiber optic internet lines, but coaxial cable networks can easily see a few heavy users adversely impact everyone else. All of that said, I've never lived anywhere with an ISP that prohibited public facing home servers- they really only had the stipulation about commercial purposes. I imagine if your server was receiving a ton of traffic (say, a popular blog) you'd get a nasty letter about it, but I don't know of anyone who has run into it.
- daveevad 4y ago
  The last time I perused the ToS for my ISP, it disallows this sort of thing if it's commercial in nature. This specific use may not be against ToS from my perspective. For the record, I selfhost a containerized instance of nextcloud inside a virtual machine on a hand-me-down 2015 iMac. It works just fine and no issues with my ISP so far.
- johnklos 4y ago
  "Most"? Nope. Perhaps that was true twenty years ago, but it's definitely not true now.
derefr 4y ago
Over the long term, I don’t trust a NAS in my house to hold my photo collection (online.) Not because of the NAS, but because of my house. Living spaces have a lot of factors that people optimize for when picking them. Data centres only have a few, and one of the most important is “is not prone to natural disasters.” Another is “has clean power with well-implemented surge and lightning-strike protection, and likely a UPS for graceful shutdown on power-cut.” I did not weigh any of those factors heavily when selecting where to live. A 1000-year flood could put my house underwater. And while you could certainly stick a drive or tape with your photo collection in a fire safe in your home — that’s not really the point, here. Online sync and thin-client access is. > They can still access it Data stored in these services can be stored E2E-encrypted with only your clients, not the backends, holding the keys. IIRC there are many apps designed exactly for this “store data across many low-trust remote clouds, never giving the cloud providers the keys” use-cases. On the other hand, IIRC there are no apps shipped by the NAS hardware vendors that do this, because they assume that your own physical ownership of the NAS is enough for you. And while you can set your NAS up to act similarly to a PC, with an encrypted disk that’s mounted on boot — that’s pretty useless, since a NAS is only serving a useful purpose when it’s already up when you need it, so its uptime will inevitably be measured in months. Which is problematic, when your modelled attacker isn’t “the cloud vendor snooping on you”, but “the government raiding your house.” Data E2E-encrypted at rest in the cloud, with the only keys being on a device in your pocket can quickly locally wipe, is much more secure against that threat. (Not that this is the most likely threat for most people, but I like considering it, because if you can solve for this, you end up solving for basically all other threat models “for free.”)
- layer8 4y ago
  How would “the government raiding your house” access the data in the NAS without first shutting it down (assuming network access is authenticated)? And then they would need the encryption password when booting it up again. (Ignoring the fact that the government might have other means to make you cooperate.)
  - derefr 4y ago
    The attack used on regular AT PCs with encrypted-at-rest boot disks but no TPM, is that DIMMs of DRAM can be popped out and immediately put into a specialized board that will keep them refreshed while scanning them (but cannot write to them.) As long as the encryption key is in plaintext in RAM, this allows you to recover it. (Also, before you remove the DIMMs, you can get the RAM + its board very cold, to decrease the decay rate during the swap.) Popular hardware NAS appliances might have all their RAM soldered on-board or part of an SoC die, but they still don't tend to have TPMs, nor an IOMMU (critical for limiting DMA rights by peripheral.) So accessing the keys on these is only a little bit more fiddly — either involving hijacking the address + data bus between the CPU and RAM; or, easier and more universal to modern devices, by putting a specialized PCI peripheral device onto the NAS's peripheral bus, that then dumps RAM by requesting DMA transfers to itself.

sneak 4y ago

This is against the ToS for most residential internet providers and can subject you to disconnection/ban from one of the few/only carriers available in your city.

generalizations 4y ago
I imagine that funneling it through an encrypted VPN would make it impossible to detect.
- sneak 4y ago
  My ISP accused me of running servers (I don't) simply because I used too much traffic. I send 100% of my traffic VPN encrypted and I pay an extra $50 or $70 monthly for "unlimited" data transfer.
- danuker 4y ago
  But then, it's not open to public access, just to you or whoever you trust with your VPN credentials.
danuker 4y ago
How tyrannical. In Romania, my ISP Digi gives me a free domain name.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  Due to old infrastructure (early adopter problem) and generally having more people with internet connected devices, ISPs differentiate between residential and business internet plans. Business plans typically provide either an SLA or at least less likely to employ traffic shaping. Residential plans tend to thus prohibit running a public facing server for commercial purposes, since they're over-provisioned on the assumption that residences don't always fully utilize their capacity. This is becoming less of an issue with fiber optic internet lines, but coaxial cable networks can easily see a few heavy users adversely impact everyone else. All of that said, I've never lived anywhere with an ISP that prohibited public facing home servers- they really only had the stipulation about commercial purposes. I imagine if your server was receiving a ton of traffic (say, a popular blog) you'd get a nasty letter about it, but I don't know of anyone who has run into it.
daveevad 4y ago
The last time I perused the ToS for my ISP, it disallows this sort of thing if it's commercial in nature. This specific use may not be against ToS from my perspective. For the record, I selfhost a containerized instance of nextcloud inside a virtual machine on a hand-me-down 2015 iMac. It works just fine and no issues with my ISP so far.
johnklos 4y ago
"Most"? Nope. Perhaps that was true twenty years ago, but it's definitely not true now.

derefr 4y ago

Over the long term, I don’t trust a NAS in my house to hold my photo collection (online.) Not because of the NAS, but because of my house. Living spaces have a lot of factors that people optimize for when picking them. Data centres only have a few, and one of the most important is “is not prone to natural disasters.” Another is “has clean power with well-implemented surge and lightning-strike protection, and likely a UPS for graceful shutdown on power-cut.” I did not weigh any of those factors heavily when selecting where to live. A 1000-year flood could put my house underwater. And while you could certainly stick a drive or tape with your photo collection in a fire safe in your home — that’s not really the point, here. Online sync and thin-client access is. > They can still access it Data stored in these services can be stored E2E-encrypted with only your clients, not the backends, holding the keys. IIRC there are many apps designed exactly for this “store data across many low-trust remote clouds, never giving the cloud providers the keys” use-cases. On the other hand, IIRC there are no apps shipped by the NAS hardware vendors that do this, because they assume that your own physical ownership of the NAS is enough for you. And while you can set your NAS up to act similarly to a PC, with an encrypted disk that’s mounted on boot — that’s pretty useless, since a NAS is only serving a useful purpose when it’s already up when you need it, so its uptime will inevitably be measured in months. Which is problematic, when your modelled attacker isn’t “the cloud vendor snooping on you”, but “the government raiding your house.” Data E2E-encrypted at rest in the cloud, with the only keys being on a device in your pocket can quickly locally wipe, is much more secure against that threat. (Not that this is the most likely threat for most people, but I like considering it, because if you can solve for this, you end up solving for basically all other threat models “for free.”)

layer8 4y ago
How would “the government raiding your house” access the data in the NAS without first shutting it down (assuming network access is authenticated)? And then they would need the encryption password when booting it up again. (Ignoring the fact that the government might have other means to make you cooperate.)
- derefr 4y ago
  The attack used on regular AT PCs with encrypted-at-rest boot disks but no TPM, is that DIMMs of DRAM can be popped out and immediately put into a specialized board that will keep them refreshed while scanning them (but cannot write to them.) As long as the encryption key is in plaintext in RAM, this allows you to recover it. (Also, before you remove the DIMMs, you can get the RAM + its board very cold, to decrease the decay rate during the swap.) Popular hardware NAS appliances might have all their RAM soldered on-board or part of an SoC die, but they still don't tend to have TPMs, nor an IOMMU (critical for limiting DMA rights by peripheral.) So accessing the keys on these is only a little bit more fiddly — either involving hijacking the address + data bus between the CPU and RAM; or, easier and more universal to modern devices, by putting a specialized PCI peripheral device onto the NAS's peripheral bus, that then dumps RAM by requesting DMA transfers to itself.