Specifically from the standpoint of protecting against common and not-so-common exploits.

I understand the concept of a reverse proxy and how works on the surface level, but do any of the common recommendations (npm, caddy, traefik) actually do anything worthwhile to protect against exploit probes and/or active attacks?

Npm has a “block common exploits” option but I can’t find anything about what that actually does, caddy has a module to add crowdsec support which looks like it could be promising but I haven’t wrapped my head around it yet, and traefik looks like a massive pain to get going in the first place!

Meanwhile Bunkerweb actually looks like it’s been built with robust protections out of the box, but seems like it’s just as complicated as traefik to setup, and DNS based Let’s Encrypt requires a pro subscription so that’s a no-go for me anyway.

Would love to hear people’s thoughts on the matter and what you’re doing to adequately secure your setup.

Edit: Thanks for all of your informative replies, everyone. I read them all and replied to as many as I could! In the end I’ve managed to get npm working with crowdsec, and once I get cloudflare to include the source IP with the requests I think I’ll be happy enough with that solution.

  • @towerfulEnglish
    3•1 month ago

    That got a bit long.
    Reading more into bunkerweb.

    Things like the “limit” feature are going to doink people on cgnat or large corporate networks. I’ve had security stuff tripped by a company using my software, and it’s a PITA cause all the requests from legit users come from only a few IP addresses.

    Antibot isn’t going to be helpful for things like JS requests, because cookies aren’t included by default with fetch requests - so the application needs to be specifically built for this (at which point, do it at an application level so it can scale easier?).
    And captcha. For whatever that is worth these days.

    Reverse Scan is going to slow down every request (as it scans the remote client for suspicious open ports, so a 500ms delay as default).

    Country is just geo-ip.

    Bad Behaviour is just rate limiting (although with a 24h ban). Sucks if a few corporate/cgnat users all hit a 404 and suddenly that entire company/ISP’s IP is blocked for a day.

    This seems like something to use when running a TOR server or something, where security is more important than user experience. Like, every feature seems to punish legit users