Did anyone paranoid like me research security implications of running Tailscale/Headscale or similiar?
Right now I’m self-hosting headscale controller in my LAN and expose it to public Internet. I’m thinking about moving it to a VPS, but I’m a little paranoid about exposing the software that controls connectivity between my and family machines to a third party, be it official Tailscale controller or VPS provider where I run Headscale.
Currently I think that even in the worst case of someone compromising my Headscale instance it should still be fine as long as all of the machines are properly firewalled and all of the exposed apps and services are behind authentication. I run everything behind Authentik and only keys for SSH access. I will certainly add some network monitoring to all of that.
Any opions and suggestions on this matter are welcome.
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So the general tailscale actually uses peer to peer wiregaurd connections. Headscale is the middle point to negotiate these wiregaurd connections.
So none of the traffic moves through the VPS.
As for a VPS itself, it’s noore unsafe than your local bare metal. It’s still an application publicly exposed and needs basic precautions like fail2ban or crowdsec
Headscale running as it’s own user with tailscale ACLs. Tailscale calls home to headscale via HTTPS and gets the info. Assuming the person doesn’t get root access it’s should be fairly safe. With tailscale ACLs you set up whicu systems can reach where. Also don’t forgot you can use UFW/iptables in each client that way it’s still locked down.
I can’t offer technical network advice on vps headscale; Personally I’m not confident in my network skills. I would be more inclined to go through the pain of manually setting up wireguard instead of having a tailscale or headscale service-- and skipping the middleman so to speak.
Edit: setting up a new system this month, Tumbleweed has moved to SE Linux Enforcing as default. It provided some ssh and samba challenges at first until I learned about setting SEL policies. So maybe hardening with SE Linux would also be smart. For example I could SSH remotely into my machine but due to policies being locked down I could not run user bash, or even see contents of the home folder.
Thanks. Plain Wireguard is an option I’m considering, but it’s also considerably more hassle to configure and maintain, especially as I connect more family members to my network. Headscale also has an extra layer of security in the form of ACLs, which I plan to use on top of basic firewall configuration. I do connect my personal machines with Wireguard, but I use one family member as a Tailscale/Headscale test subject.
As for SELinux, I’ve gave up on it already. It caused me so much headache over the years I disable it with a kernel parameter by default on all machines.
Yeah it definitely is a pain for adding multiple machines.
I always wondered the same about ZeroTier. If the controller is under foreign control, isn’t the whole network compromised?
Yes but there are ways to protect against that. For instance you can configure Tailscale clients to only trust nodes that have been signed by trusted nodes, or something like that.
