Homelab

NAS vendors aren't known for understanding security. Opening ssh to the world is no problem, because ssh is everywhere, it's constantly attacked, and half the world would know if an exploitable vulnerability was found.

If NAS vendor ABC has a vulnerability in the login code written by a programmer who hasn't done much more than CSS, it would surprise nobody, and you wouldn't hear about it on any IT news sites. It would just be exploited until all the machines were exploited or until they're all patched.

It really is a world of difference between something known and secure and some random login page.

Speaking as someone who decided to "just be a consumer and trust that my NAS manufacturer had appropriately hardened the login interface", and was using 2FA, and subsequently fell victim to a ransomware attack:

Do not expose any port on your NAS to the internet.

If you really want it available to you when you're away from home, set up a VPN using a separate device as the VPN server.

All software has bugs. Sometimes bugs let you do things you weren't intended to be able to do (e.g. access data on a NAS without knowing the login password). Your NAS might have a bug that hasn't been discovered (or publicized yet) or hasn't been fixed yet.

If you put your NAS on the internet, you give "bad guys" am opportunity to exploit those bugs to get your data or to use your NAS as a jumping off spot to attack other things inside your home network.

Security for systems are designed for their target use case. The NAS login page was designed to be easily usable and assumed to only live within a private network. By opening to the internet you are opening it up to be targeted in a way the designers may not have accounted for.

Here’s the way I think of it. Imagine you live in a house at the end of a long street. Your front door is the login page to your Synology. All the measures you’ve put in place (cloudlfare, ip blocklists, firewall) are the equivalent of putting up a guard booth/gate at the end of your driveway that only allows cars with a license plate of a specific state.

You haven’t made yourself significantly more secure, just lined the traffic up in a more organized fashion. You are still trusting the people that made your door lock to not be vulnerable.

Yes, it’s easier to access vs having a big metal gate that only you have the code to open (VPN) in front of your house. But why open yourself up to a single point of failure?

Here’s just one recent example of an attacker being able to bypass the authentication on a synology. All the things you have implemented wouldn’t prevent a single person in the internet from using this exploit. https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/advisories/ZDI-23-660/

Don't expose the login to internet. Use twingate, headscale/tailscale. It's super easy to setup and use zero trust network access.

Surprised no one posted this, the web and cyber threat look like that : https://livethreatmap.radware.com/

I wouldn't trust Synology on that aspect, better have an entry over VPN.

if you must, have you looked at the azure application proxy? if you configure it properly it should work from the outside world, and still remain private. This does put a lost of trust into azure, and your tenant's users not getting broken into.

If your DS920+ is completely inaccessible to outside your network except for the Cloudflare tunnel, then the Synology firewall and IP blocklist aren't going to do squat for you since all connections will appear to originate from either inside your network or from Cloudflare. So you're 100% dependent on Cloudflare to keep bad actors out.

I'm not familiar with Cloudflare but the impression I had from looking at it was that you can decide which authenticated Cloudflare users can access your tunnel. So it's a matter of credential management. Supposing some bad actor gets your credentials, they would then be able to access the entirety of your NAS, and you're now hoping that there isn't some undiscovered or unpatched security hole that they can use.

Use 2fa and you'll be fine.

The internet is like the wild west. There are bandits and outlaws everywhere. But automated. Bandit bots and outlaw bots who scan the internet all the time for open ports, trying to see if they can find an outdated version of software for which they have exploits. Some bots even have zero day exploits, which are unknown to the manufacturer of the software (the manufacturer has known zero days about the exploit, hence the name). When they find a match they will automatically hack the software running on the port and try do privilege escalation (essentially become admin). Then they might install a copy of themselves on your machine, fortifying their bandit army (botnet). Most of the time the criminal behind the botnet can now also control your machine and do anything with it. Many times acces to these hacked machines also get sold on the darkweb to other criminals.

> how would someone be able to break in via the DSM login?

They probably couldn't. But, at the end of the day, the risk is yours to take. Nothing is 100% secure; it's all about degrees of security vs usability. You seem to have taken a reasonable approach to protecting the web service, so that's a good start. Other things would be to ensure that access is logged, and that failed attempts are delayed between retries (preventing brute forcing to be completed in a reasonable time) - not sure if Synology has that or not.

Are you going to update the firmware upon every release? Are you going to monitor for vulnerabilities?

TA have automated software that will find it, and mess with it for funsies

Cyber Security seems to bring out weird bravado where people pretend like they know more than they do. This thread is literally dozens and dozens of people spouting nonsense.

The bottom line is if you're running a cloudflare tunnel with authentication on the tunnel itself to a trusted auth provider and then enable 2FA on that auth provider, you have a zero trust model that is about as secure as most modern companies. All of the people saying BUT WHAT ABOUT ZERO DAY are beyond dumb. Enable auto-updates on everything you can, script the rest. The chances of there being a zero day vulnerability to cloudflare and then a bot is able to hit your synology page which then has its own security they need to get past, it's not likely at all. Monitor your Synology login attempts just in case it's all built in.

Hi OP, someone using nmap would have a fun time trying to find any open ports to exploit.

Not exactly related to your question, but why not just use tailscale to access your NAS remotely?

Simple, no vendor can create completely secure software. The main way to prevent someone from breaking into your front door when a new vulnerability is discovered is to not present a front door to the internet.

It is impossible to overstate how exposed you really are when leaving interfaces like this open to the internet to be scanned, catalogued, then exploited and used (or damaged) as soon as a new vulnerability is weaponized.

i almost couldn't tell this is an advertisement

simple rule, if you don't want something viewable by others then don't expose it to the internet. Its not a complicated rule, however many people fail this simple bit of logic.

An example, family photos, holiday videos, music and tv shows. All things that don't really matter if someone gains access to. It's at most an invasion of privacy.

Another example, bank statements, birth certificates, financial documents, scans of your credit and debit card, IoT. These are all things that pose a potential risk to you if someone gains access to them. Don't put them on the internet, nobody can ever find them on the internet.

The internet by its very nature is built to share data, the easiest way to avoid sensitive data from being breached is to not have it on a device connected to the net in the first place.

See my other comment, but the basic problem is you are only putting one layer of protection if you expose directly to the Internet. If there is a vulnerability in NAS, then bots can exploit just that layer and get in.

If you have tunnel/VPN then NAS, they have to have a vulnerability in the VPN, then also be able to use the VPN to exploit the NAS (or some other device on the VPN).

Add another layer, like IP limitations on the tunnel, then you have to have 3 exploits. Etc...

Synology sells based on convenience of features, and good enough security as a second thought. VPN or tunnel software exists to provide security. So you want to mix the focus and the providers to minimize chance any one provider or mistake will let you get hacked.

The biggest risk for a typical home lab is from bot scanners and not targeted attacks, so they are unlikely to target a connection with more than one layer as there are many, many simpler targets.

It'd be best to host a vpn publically instead, and get to the synology via the VPN.

Tbh if you set up MFA on the account, its ok to open it the internet.

Kinda like the others have stated, you’re trusting the company to have fixed any known vulnerabilities, but also that there aren’t any unknown exploits.

Ultimately the question isn’t should you or not, but is the risk worth it? If your home finances are contained there in, if those impossible to recover or reproduce pictures are stored on there, then if you were to have your system locked with ransomware, how important is that data? Do you have their camera system? Would you mind the random internet looking at those cameras? That’s the real question.

If you only have some downloads you could find again and if you lose everything on the system, then you’re not risking much, so it’s kinda why not?

It’s a matter of risk tolerance and how much you trust Synology.

For one thing, it announces to the internet that your device is there. If there is one thing you could do to make it easy on a hacker it is to tell them what and where to hack. There might not be any complete exploits today, but there will be tomorrow, and when it happens, there will be a race between you and the bad guy to either patch or exploit. Are you updating often enough to protect your device from any possible random point in time in the future? If you have nothing to lose, don't worry about it, but most people store things they feel are worth storing.

This guy! If they can hack the us govt in hours your synology is a piece of cake

Most NAS aren't designed to be exposed to the World Wide Net. The login page isnt designed to handle things like DDOS or brut force attacks. Most of them don't have 2 factor login option built in.

This plus, the fact you are exposing all of your data via this web interface. Allowing hackers to easily crypt mine/delete/steal your data.

After all of this, how would someone be able to break in via the DSM login?

You trust Synology that much? Yikes

Good conversation. Great comments.

What are you protecting, what is the value to you, how much are you willing to protect it.

Convenient is unsecured, Secure is inconvenient.

Look, what you have is probably fine, but you just have to accept that you now have this page open to the world and you are relying on Synology to be on top of their security and you to be up-to-date.

I use Cloudflare tunnels myself for Plex and the like (separate VLAN), but I keep my local Network and all portals only available via a VPN.

Like all others here have said, it’s an unnecessary risk. You can set up a VPN to your home network with DDNS on your router (if you have a public IP) and that will be much better

It's basically the same as any other time people expose something to the internet.

Most don't know what they're doing or how to do it safely so they put a vulnerable device out in a vulnerable state.

The only reason a NAS is worse is because it's more common for a home user to have a NAS then it is to do something like host a WordPress, and a NAS has more personal stuff than a WordPress does (usually)

Everyone: this is a bad idea.

OP: well im getting mixed signals